We examine the impact of large scale asset purchase announcements of government bonds on real GDP and the CPI in the United Kingdom and the United States with a Bayesian VAR, estimated on monthly data from 2009M3 to 2014M5. We identify an asset purchase announcement shock with four different...

This paper uses vector autoregressions to examine the monetary transmission mechanism in Japan. The empirical results indicate that both monetary policy and banks' balance sheets are important sources of shocks, that banks play a crucial role in transmitting monetary shocks to economic activity,...

Should one think of zero nominal interest rates as an undesirable liquidity trap or as the desirable Friedman rule? I use three different frameworks to discuss this issue. First, I restate Cole and Kocherlakota's (1998) analysis of Friedman's rule: short run increases in the money stock -...

We compare monetary union to flexible exchange rates in an asymmetric, three-country model with active monetary policy. Unlike Friedman's (1953) case for flexible rates, we find that countries with high degree of nominal wage rigidity are better off in a monetary union. Their benefits increase...

This paper studies the strategic interaction of Euroland's national macroeconomic players and the ECB council under two alternative assumptions on central bank behavior: (i) all members of the ECB council are concerned about Euroland's macroeconomic aggregates and (ii) the ECB council is...

This paper assembles an original panel of data from 2,500 restaurants in Italy over the 1998-2004 period. The main objective is to study whether the euro cash changeover had an impact on individual pricing behaviour, as it seems to be perceived by consumers. Although the sample is not...

The paper analyses how globalization forces induce monetary authorities, guided in their policies by the welfare criterion of a representative household, to put greater emphasis on reducing the inflation rate than on narrowing the output gaps. We demonstrate that the marginal rate of...

We construct a utility-based model of fluctuations, with nominal rigidities and unemployment, and draw its implications for the unemployment-inflation trade-off and for the conduct of monetary policy. We proceed in two steps. We first leave nominal rigidities aside. We show that, under a...

This paper develops a model of the choice between bank and market finance by entrepreneurial firms that differ in the value of their net worth. The monitoring associated with bank finance ameliorates a moral hazard problem between the entrepreneurs and their lenders. The model is used to analyze...

This Paper compares the social efficiency of monetary targeting and inflation targeting when central banks may have private information on shocks to money demand and, because of verifiability problems, the transparency solution is not feasible. Under inflation targeting and monetary targeting,...