Thanks to the Maastricht Treaty and similar arrangements, central banks nowadays enjoy considerable independence. This is generally believed to be the result of relatively recent debates, which led to the conclusion that sheltering monetary authorities from the pressures of fiscal policymakers...

We estimate forward-looking interest-rate rules for five large OECD economies, allowing for time variation in the responses to macroeconomic conditions and in the variance of the policy rate. Conventional constant-parameter reaction functions likely blur the impact of i) model uncertainty, ii)...