For the successful conduct of monetary policy the central bank needs reliable indicators of the monetary policy stance. A recently often advocated one is the gap between the real, market and the natural rate of interest. In this article we estimate the historical time series of the natural rate...

In this paper, I use a structural VAR model and the Kalman filter to estimate the natural rate of interest (NRI) in Poland. I show how the NRI can yield important information for a central banker. First, estimation of the NRI can be helpful for monetary authorities, seeking to stabilize...

Liquidity traps occur when the natural nominal interest rate becomes negative. In a model with capital price dynamics explicitly considered, we find that shocks in the future can cause current and lasting liquidity traps. We propose that the central bank can prevent or fix liquidity traps by...

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...

Factor-augmented VARs (FAVARs) have combined standard VARs with factor analysis to exploit large data sets in the study of monetary policy. FAVARs enjoy a number of advantages over VARs: they allow a better identification of the monetary policy shock; they can avoid the use of a single variable...

According to several empirical studies, US inflation and nominal interest rates, as well as the real interest rate, can be described as unit root processes. These results imply that nominal interest rates and expected inflation do not move one-for-one in the long run, which is not consistent...

This paper investigates the degree and nature of economic and monetary policy relations among the United States, the Euro area, and Great Britain. Using daily interest rates, we estimate the impact of monetary policy announcements of a Central Bank on its domestic market and in what measure...

This paper asks to what extent the market prices in the future monetary policy decisions of the Czech National Bank (CNB), how this policy predictability has evolved over time, and whether the change in the central bank’s forecasting methodology in mid-2002 had any impact. Using a sample up to...

Prevalent thinking about liquidity traps suggests that the perfect substitutability of money and bonds at a zero short-term nominal interest rate renders open-market operations ineffective for achieving macroeconomic stabilization goals. We show that even were this the case, there remains a...

In this paper we analyse disinflation policy in two environments. In the first, the central bank has perfect knowledge, in the sense that it understands and observes the process by which private sector inflation expectations are generated; in the second, the central bank has to learn the private...