The recent literature on monetary policy in the presence of a zero lower bound on interest rates has shown that forward guidance regarding the path of interest rates can be very effective in preserving macroeconomic stability in the face of a contractionary demand shock; moreover, that...

This paper uses long-run restrictions on a three-variable system containing output growth, real wage growth and the differenced unemployment rate, to isolate three 'structural' shocks which drove business cycle fluctuations in Spain during 1970-94. These shocks are interpreted as aggregate...

Recent evidence suggests that consumption rises in response to an increase in government spending. That finding cannot be easily reconciled with existing optimizing business cycle models. We extend the standard new Keynesian model to allow for the presence of rule-of-thumb consumers. We show how...

Using Bayesian methods, we estimate a nonlinear DSGE model in which the interest-rate lower bound is occasionally binding. We quantify the size and nature of disturbances that pushed the U.S. economy to the lower bound in late 2008 as well as the contribution of the lower bound constraint to the...

The New Keynesian Phillips curve explains inflation dynamics as being driven by current and expected future real marginal costs. In competitive labour markets, the labour share can serve as a proxy for the latter. In this paper, we study the role of real marginal cost components implied by...

We develop and estimate an open economy New Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) in which variable demand elasticities give rise to movements in desired markups in response to changes in competitive pressure from abroad. A parametric restriction on our specification yields the standard NKPC, in which...

In this paper, we show that strategic complementarities--such as firm-specific factors or quasi-kinked demand--have crucial implications for the design of monetary policy and for the welfare costs of output and inflation variability. Recent research has mainly used log-linear approximations to...