Modern monetary policy analysis is built around the concept of an interest rate rule that responds to both inflation and output. This paper evaluates the quantitative implications of having a policy rule target different definitions of the output gap in a New Keynesian model with endogenous...

Many empirical studies have found that interest rate increases have a positive effect on the price level. This paper pursues an obvious, but neglected explanation: interest payments are a cost of production that is at least in part passed on to customers. A model shows that the cost- push effect...

The paper reviews the recent conduct of monetary policy and the central bank’s rule-based behavior in Russia. Using different policy rules, we test whether the central bank in Russia reacts to changes in inflation, output gap and the exchange rate in a consistent and predictable manner. Our...

This paper offers an alternative explanation for the behavior of postwar US inflation by measuring a novel source of monetary policy time- inconsistency due to Cukierman (2002). In the presence of asymmetric preferences, the monetary authorities end up generating a systematic inflation bias...

Sufficiently flexible labour markets are considered an important precondition for countries to benefit from membership in the monetary union. Economic policy coordination within the European Community is extensive and includes issues related to labour market structures. In this paper we study...

In this paper we assess whether monetary variables convey marginal information on the state of the Italian economy, taking as a benchmark the forecasting errors generated by the quarterly model used by the Bank of Italy in the 1990s. We follow two alternative approaches. First we map monetary...

This paper assesses the ECB’s performance, which the author finds to be seriously lacking but which is of paramount importance to understanding euroland’s ongoing stagnation and fragility. A main finding is that the series of policy blunders which characterized the bank’s conduct features...

Monetary policy has been usually analyzed in the context of small macroeconomic models where central banks are allowed to exploit a limited amount of information. Under these frameworks, researchers typically derive the optimality of aggressive monetary rules, contrasting with the observed...

Can a strategy of targeting macro projections be the only guide for monetary policy actions, or could it cause macroeconomic instability in the face of imprecise information? The paper examines how the precision of the indicators affects determinacy in a model with partial information and an...

One of the central lessons learned from the Great Depression was that adjusting government spending each year to balance the budget increases the volatility of output. We compare this policy with one that involves running temporary deficits and surpluses and an average budget balance of zero....