In 1991, the rate of inflation in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland was between 35% and 70%. At the end of 2001, it is below 8%. We setup a small structural macro model of these economies to explain the process of disinflation. Contrary to a widespread skepticism, which permeated a large...

The paper attempts to examine whether there is price convergence across various regions in India. Our results indicate significant presence of cross-sectional de- pendence in prices in India, rendering some of the standard panel unit root tests inapplicable. Using various panel unit root tests...

The existing literature on the stabilizing properties of interest-rate feedback rules has stressed the perils of linking interest rates to forecasts of future inflation. Such rules have been found to give rise to aggregate fluctuations due to self-fulfilling expectations. In response to this...

Various inflation forecasting models are compared using a simulated out-of-sample forecasting framework. We focus on the question of whether monetary aggregates are useful for forecasting inflation, but unlike previous work we examine a wide range of forecast horizons and allow for estimated as...

In einer Währungsunion sind Inflationsdifferenzen zwischen den Mitgliedsländern gleichbedeutend mit Veränderungen des realen Wechselkurses. Dies mag erklären, warum in jüngerer Vergangenheit die Inflationsdifferenzen innerhalb der Europäischen Währungsunion verstärkte Aufmerksamkeit in...

This paper analyzes empirically the impact of fiscal policy on the price level for the cases of Germany and Spain. We investigate whether the fiscal theory of the price level (FTPL) is able to deliver a reasonable explanation for the different performances of the price level in these two...

The uniqueness of bounded local equilibria under interest rate rules is analyzed in a model with sticky information à la Mankiw and Reis (2002). The main results are tighter bounds on monetary policy than in sticky-price models, irrelevance of the degree of output-gap targeting for determinacy,...

During the last two decades, the world has experienced a remarkable process of disinflation, with average inflation rates in industrialized countries falling by 10 percentage points and an even sharper decline of the mean rate of inflation in developing countries. Parallel to the decline in...

Small businesses tend to be owned by wealthy households. Such entrepreneur households also own a large share of U.S. stock market wealth. Fluctuations in entrepreneurs' hunger for risk could therefore help explain time variation in the equity premium. The paper suggests an entrepreneurial...

This paper surveys recent advances in the monetary transmission mechanism (MTM). In particular, while laying out the functioning of the separate channels in the MTM, special attention is paid to exploring possible interrelations between different channels through which they may amplify or...