Recent evidence on the effect of government spending shocks on consumption cannot be easily reconciled with existing optimizing business cycle models. We extend the standard New Keynesian model to allow for the presence of rule-of-thumb (non-Ricardian) consumers. We show how the interaction of...

This paper presents the Spanish country block (ES-MCM) of the ESCB Multi-Country Model for the euro area, which has been built in a close co-operation with the ECB and the Banco de Espaa. The theoretical structure of the ES-MCM block is in line with most current mainstream macro models, i.e. the...

The last decade has been characterised by the pronounced volatility of capital flows. While cross-border capital flows can have many benefits for both advanced and emerging market economies, they may also carry risks, which require appropriate policy responses. Disentangling the push from the...

"The Great Recession" was preceded by a prolonged period of high growth accompanied by low and stable inflation, the so called "The Great Moderation". In Spain, a similar pattern was observed: in fact, potential growth estimates were trending upwards, implying that output gaps remained...

In this paper, we show that strategic complementarities'such as firm-specific factors or quasikinked demand?have crucial implications for the design of monetary policy and for the welfare costs of output and inflation variability. Recent research has mainly used log-linear approximations to...

We assess the empirical relevance for inflation dynamics of accounting for the presence of search frictions in the labor market. The New Keynesian Phillips curve explains inflation dynamics as being mainly driven by current and expected future marginal costs. Recent empirical research has...

Woodford (2003) describes a popular class of neo-Wicksellian models in which monetary policy is characterized by an interest-rate rule, and the money market and financial institutions are typically not even modeled. Critics contend that these models are incomplete and unsuitable for...

In this paper we present supporting evidence of the existence of heterogeneity in inflation dynamics across euro area countries. Based on the estimation of New Phillips Curves for five major countries of the euro area, we find that there is significant inertial (backward looking) behavior in...

We study the optimal monetary policy problem in a New Keynesian economy with a zero lower bound (ZLB) on the nominal interest rate, when the steady state natural rate (r*) becomes permanently negative. We show that the optimal policy aims to approach gradually a new steady state with positive...

We document three changes in postwar US macroeconomic dynamics: (i) the procyclicality of labor productivity has vanished, (ii) the relative volatility of employment has risen, and (iii) the relative (and absolute) volatility of the real wage has risen. We propose an explanation for all three...