We revisit recent evidence on how monetary policy affects output and prices in the U.S. and in the euro area. The response patterns to a shift in monetary policy are similar in most respects, but differ noticeably as to the composition of output changes. In the euro area investment is the...

The process through which economic policy is conceived and decided cannot be simply described as the optimisation of a well-defined loss function s ubject to the constraints provided by a model of the economy. Even egnoring the forbidding difficulties of eliciting a stable and explicit loss...

Policy evaluation based on the estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with aggregate macroeconomic time series rests on the assumption that a representative agent can be identified, whose behavioural parameters are independent of the policy rules. Building on earlier work by...

We survey the existing work on the cross-country differences in the transmission of European monetary policy. We find that prior work, focusing on macroeconomic data, does not clearly answer the question posed in the title and offer some explanations for the ambiguity.