This paper investigates whether OECD countries are facing secular stagnation. Secular stagnation is defined as a situation when policy interest rates bounded at zero fail to stimulate demand sufficiently, due to low or negative neutral real interest rates and low inflation, and when ensuing...

This paper describes developments in real long-term interest rates in the main OECD economies and surveys their various determinants. Real long-term government bond yields declined from the 1980s to very low levels in the recent period, though they have not reached the historical lows of the...

Using a semi-structural approach, we jointly estimate time-varying national natural real rates of interest for the four largest economies of the euro area over 1999-2016 and discuss the associated challenges for the single monetary policy. We find evidence of an increased dispersion of real...

We compute optimized monetary policy rules for the ECB when the euro area economy is described by a small empirical macroeconomic model with a time-varying natural interest rate which is positively correlated with fluctuations in trend output growth. We investigate the consequences of both...

This paper presents a no-arbitrage model of the yield curve that explicitly incorporates the central-bank policy rate. After having estimated the model using daily euro-area data, I explore the behavior of risk premia at the short end of the yield curve. These risk premia are neglected by the...

In this paper, I investigate the effects of the ECB's monetary policy on the yield curve, and make contributions at three levels. First, I propose a novel and tractable model of the yield curve that belongs to the class of affine term-structure models. Importantly, this model is consistent with...