Two impediments to effective monetary policy operation include illiquidity in bond markets and the move towards the zero bound of interest rates. Either or both of these scenarios have been evident in many countries in the last decade, raising the suggestion that alternative means of enacting...

This paper considers Beveridge-Nelson decomposition in a context where the permanent and transitory components both follow a Markov switching process. Our approach insorporates Markov switching into a single source of error state-space framework, allowing business cycle asymmetries and regime...

This paper proposes a simple framework that generalizes the timing structure of macroeconomic (as well as other) games. Building on alternative move games and models of "rational inattention" the players' actions may be rigid, ie optimally chosen to be infrequent. This rigidity makes the game...

This paper assesses the effects of asymmetric information and agency costs in credit markets in an open economy with a floating exchange rate and sticky prices. A decline in agency costs lowers the cost of external finance and increases the long-run level of steady state investment, capital and...

The typical New-Keynesian small-open-economy model has qualitative features and monetary-policy prescriptions similar to their original closed-economy counterparts - i.e. complete stablization of domestic inflation is sufficient for optimal policy. We consider a version of the model here where...

Opponents of inflation targeting have argued that a commitment to a numerical inflation target reduces policy's stabilization flexibility - increasing output volatility under supply shocks. Using a novel game theoretic approach our paper demonstrates that this claim may fail to account for the...

This paper shows that unit labor costs (ulcs), the most widely used measure of competitiveness, can be interpreted as the labor share in output multiplied by a price-adjustment factor. This has three main implications. First, ulcs are not just a technical concept since they embody the social...

The importance of the time-consistency poblem depends critically on the model one is working with and its parameterizations. This paper attempts to quantify the magnitude of stabilization bias for a small open economy using an empirically estimated micro-founded dynamic stochastic general...

Time series analysis for the Euro Area requires the availability of sufficiently long historical data series, but the appropriate construction methodology has received little attention. The benchmark dataset, developed by the European Central Bank for use in its Area Wide Model (AWM), is based...

Monetary and fiscal policies interact in many ways. Recently, the stance of fiscal policy in a number of countries (including the EU and the US) has raised concerns about risks for the outcomes of monetary policy. Our paper first shows that these concerns are justified since - under an ambitious...