The European Central Bank has assigned a special role to money in its two pillar strategy and has received much criticism for this decision. The case against including money in the central bank's interest rate rule is based on a standard model of the monetary transmission process that underlies...

This paper analyzes the impact of strained government finances on macroeconomic stability and the transmission of fiscal policy. Using a variant of the model by Curdia and Woodford (2009), we study a 'sovereign risk channel' through which sovereign default risk raises funding costs in the...

This paper uses a data-set including time series data on macroeconomic variables, loans, deposits and interest rates for the euro area in order to study the features of financial intermediation over the business cycle. We find that stylized facts for aggregate monetary and real variables are...

This paper contributes to a recent debate about the structural and institutional conditions under which discretion may be superior to timeless perspective. We show this is unlikely when the policy maker relies on a welfare-theoretic loss function obtained as a second-order approximation of...

Can monetary policy trigger pronounced boom-bust cycles in house prices and create persistent business cycles? We address this question by building heuristics into an otherwise standard DSGE model. As a result, monetary policy sets off waves of optimism and pessimism ('animal spirits') that...

There is widespread evidence that monetary policy exerts asymmetric effects on output over contractions and expansions in economic activity, while price responses display no sizeable asymmetry. To rationalize these facts we develop a dynamic general equilibrium model where households’ utility...

Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We...

This Paper uses multi-step forecasting models at horizons of 4 and 8 quarters to forecast and explain the growth of real per capita US GDP. In the modeling strategy, a priori sign restrictions play an important role. They are imposed not on impulse response functions but directly on the reduced...

This paper introduces a new indicator of core inflation for New Zealand, estimated using a dynamic factor model and disaggregate consumer price data. Using disaggregate consumer price data we can directly compare the predictive performance of our core indicator with a wide range of other ‘core...

This survey outlines the general lessons of the recent literature on imperfectly competitive macroeconomies for the theory of monetary and fiscal policy. A general framework is presented which encompasses most of the existing literature. Although money is of itself neutral in these models, the...