This paper reviews the literature on what the zero bound to nominal interest rates implies for the conduct of monetary policy. The aim is to evaluate the risks of hitting the zero bound; and to evaluate policies that are said to be able to reduce that risk, or policies that are proposed as means...

This paper presents evidence on the lag between monetary policy actions and the response of inflation in the euro area as a whole as well as in Germany, Italy and France. In line with previous findings for the US and the UK, results here show that this lag is longer than one year both in the...

We examine the performance of forward-looking inflation-forecast-based rules in open economies. In a New Keynesian two-bloc model, a methodology first employed by Batini and Pearlman (2002) is used to obtain analytically the feedback parameters/horizon pairs associated with unique and stable...