Recent research has questioned the usefulness of Vector Autoregression (VAR) models as a description of monetary policy, especially in light of the low correlation between forecast errors from VARs and those derived from Fed funds futures rates. This paper presents three findings on VARs'...

This paper takes up the issue of the flexibility of inflation targeting regimes, with the specific goal of determining whether the monetary policy of the Bank of England, which has a formal inflation target, has been any less flexible than that of the Federal Reserve, which does not have such a...

Granting central banks independence from short-term political control is widely assumed to decrease inflation by increasing the credibility of commitments to price stability. This paper analyzes public- and private-sector behavior in a sample of seventeen OECD countries for evidence of...

No one seems to be neutral about the effects of EMU on the German economy. Roughly speaking, there are two camps: those who see the euro as the advent of a newly open, large, and efficient regime which will lead to improvements in European and in particular in German competitiveness; those who...