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...

In this paper we consider inflation and government debt dynamics when monetary policy employs a global interest rate rule and private agents’ forecasts using adaptive learning. Because of the zero lower bound on interest rates, active interest rate rules are known to imply the existence of a...

This paper investigates the dynamic effects of monetary and fiscal policy in a monetary union, which is characterized by asymmetric interest rate transmission. This asymmetry gives rise to intertemporal reversals in the relative effectiveness of policy on member country outputs. The direction...

This paper assesses the contribution of the European Central Bank (ECB) to Germany’s ongoing economic crisis, a vicious circle of decline in which the country has become stuck since the early 1990s. It is argued that the ECB continues the Bundesbank tradition of asymmetric policymaking: the...

In this paper, we analyze coordination of macroeconomic stabilization policies within the EMU by focusing, in a dynamic set-up, on asymmetries, externalities, and the existence of a multi-country context. We study how coalitions among fiscal and monetary authorities are formed and what are their...

In this paper we introduce an application of the supply-side channel for fiscal policy to the basic New Keynesian model. We use a proportional tax rate instead of lump sum tax and introduce the distortions of a tax wedge. We derive a closed economy forward-looking model with government...

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...

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...