Achieving high productivity growth is a central goal of policymaking, given that productivity (growth) impacts not only key macroeconomic variables, but also a country's living standards. Central banks have an intrinsic interest in promoting productivity growth because of its interaction with...

After the global financial crisis and until 2021, the primary objective of central banks in advanced economies was to implement policies aimed at increasing inflation, given that inflation had been too low for too long. Having reached the effective lower bound (ELB) of nominal interest rates,...

With the capital markets union (CMU), the European Union embarked on one of its yet most ambitious and potentially most relevant reform projects. However, the huge potential for the European economy by a genuine CMU has not yet been realized. The key reason for this is that an important...

The room for maneuver of monetary policy and the relevance of the zero lower bound of nominal interest rates are largely determined by the level of and the outlook for the natural rate of interest (R*), i.e. the unobservable equilibrium interest rate that neither stimulates nor contracts the...