Inflation has been well contained over the last decades in most industrialized countries. This implies, however, that memories of high inflation are likely to fade, because over time larger parts of the population have never experienced high inflation, whereas those who have might forget. This...

We test the interest rate sensitivity of subprime credit card borrowers using a unique panel data set from a UK credit card company. What is novel about our contribution is that we were given details of a randomized interest rate experiment conducted by the lender between October 2006 and...

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...

Based on the householdsu0092 utility maximisation, a closed form approximation of the consumption function is derived and the deep parameters of the consumption function are estimated using aggregate euro area data. The novel element in our approach is the parameterisation of the information...

There is already a small literature emphasising the empirical failure of the New Keynesian IS curve, but it is not yet known if this failure reflects empirical problems associated with small samples or is rather a structural weakness of the underlying model. To address this question, in this...

This paper develops a small-scale DSGE model which embeds a demographic structure within a monetary policy framework. We extend the tractable, though non-monetary overlapping-generations model of Gertler (1999) and present a small synthesis model which combines the set-up of Gertler with a...

The financial crisis has highlighted the need for models that can identify counterparty risk exposures and shock transmission processes at the systemic level. We use the euro area financial accounts (flow of funds) data to construct a sector-level network of bilateral balance sheet exposures and...

I investigate the effect of wealth on consumption in a new dataset with financial and housing wealth from 16 countries. The baseline estimation method based on the sluggishness of consumption growth implies that the eventual (long-run) marginal propensity to consume out of total wealth is 5...

This paper presents a simple new method for measuring `wealth effects' on aggregate consumption. The method exploits the stickiness of consumption growth (sometimes interpreted as reflecting consumption `habits') to distinguish between immediate and eventual wealth effects. In U.S. data, we...

This paper develops a general equilibrium model to analyze the link between financial imbalances and financial crises. The model features an interbank market subject to frictions and where two equilibria may (co-)exist. The normal times equilibrium is characterized by a deep market with highly...