We separate changes of the federal funds rate into two components; one reflects the Fed's superior forecasts about the state of the economy and the other component reflects the Fed's reaction to the public's forecast about the state of the economy. Romer and Romer (2000) found that the Fed...

This paper examines robust estimators of core inflation for Belgian historical CPI data, and for euro area Harmonised Indices of Consumer Prices. Evidence of fat tails in the cross-sections of price changes is provided by traditional measures, as well as by a robust measure of the tail weights...

We study price level convergence within the US and EMU, using panel estimates of regional Phillips curves of the hybrid New-Keynesian type. The estimated half lives of deviations from trend PPP are around three years for US regions and two years for euro area countries. The start of EMU had no...

We find that regional inflation dispersion has not markedly increased since the start of EMU, although it is somewhat higher than in other monetary unions (US and Germany), and that the distribution of member states' rates of inflation around the euro area HICP inflation rate is characterised by...

We verify whether cocoa prices could be a source of inflation in five countries of the West African region within a framework that includes other variables such as migrant remittances to the region and a fiscal policy variable represented by the government budget deficit. Unlike earlier studies...

The empirical evidence suggests that there is a significant, negative relationship between inflation and economic growth. Conventional monetary growth models, however, predict a significantly smaller growth effect. This paper proposes a monetary growth model with an explicit credit service...

This paper assesses the empirical performance of the forward-looking new Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) in France, Germany and Italy for the period 1991.3-2004.4. Instead of imposing rational expectations, I use direct measures of inflation expectations constructed from Consensus Economics...

The main objective of this paper is to explain the phenomena of persistent inflation in Romania through the use of a simple empirical model which highlights the links between inflation and the government budget deficit. We discuss the importance of using a proper definition of the public sector...

Different speed and aftermath of the transition of twenty post-communist Central and Eastern European countries to free-market economy has posed a question about political and economical reasons led only some countries being successful in their transformation. The attempt was done in this paper...