The aim of this paper is to study whether price level or inflation targeting would be appropriate monetary policy regimes for Japan. A necessary condition for such regimes is that the rate of interest remain a positive tool of monetary policy. Using VAR and SVAR approaches, we investigate...

This paper evaluates the usefulness of business sentiment indicators for forecasting developments in the Chinese real economy. We use data on diffusion indices collected by the People's Bank of China for forecasting industrial production, retail sales and exports. Our bivariate vector...

This paper examines whether price level or inflation targeting would have been appropriate policy choices for Japan during its disinflation and deflation period. We employ Markov switching and structural vector autoregressions, together with structural IS equations, to investigate monetary...

This paper evaluates the usefulness of a McCallum-type monetary policy rule based on money supply for maintaining price stability in mainland China. We examine whether excess money relative to rule-based values provides information that improves the forecasting of price developments. The results...

This paper describes long-term trends in public investment and analyses their causes and consequences. This has been undertaken separately for the EU-15 and the new member countries in Central and Eastern Europe. In addition, it assesses the significance of infrastructure finance through...

We use factor analysis to summarize information from various macroeconomic indicators, effectively producing coincident indicators for the Chinese economy. We compare the dynamics of the estimated factors with GDP, and compare our factors with other published indicators for the Chinese economy....

This thesis consists of four essays in empirical macroeconomics. The first three essays examine the conduct of monetary policy during a disinflationary and deflationary era, with the policy interest rates close to or at the zero bound. The questions of interest include the potency of the...

We evaluate the monetary determinants of inflation in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia by using the McCallum rule for money supply. The deviation of actual money growth from the rule is included in the estimation of Phillips curves for the four economies by Bayesian model...