The biggest and most well-known unsolved problem in academic finance is famously referred to as the Equity Premium Puzzle. It refers to the unexplained phenomenon that for over 100 years the average return on a well-diversified portfolio of equities has far outperformed that of risk-free,...

What policy space does a country have for a short-term response to a catastrophic event? To quantify this space, the paper proposes a policy space index. The index combines a quantitative, albeit relatively limited and narrow, fiscal space concept with the indicators of nominal monetary space...

Central to current policy debates regarding public pensions, the appropriate macroeconomic policy mix, and any number of other issues related to growth, development, poverty alleviation, and so forth, is the concept of fiscal sustainability. For neoclassical economists, fiscal sustainability is...

In this paper we adopt a Bayesian approach towards the estimation of the monetary policy preference parameters in a general equilibrium framework. We start from the model presented by Smets and Wouters (2003) for the euro area where, in the original set up, monetary policy behaviour is described...

We show that a monetary policy in which the central bank commits to a randomized inflation target allows for potentially faster-expectations convergence than with a fixed target. The randomized target achieves faster convergence in particular in transition environments: those demonstrating...

In this paper we adopt a Bayesian approach towards the estimation of the monetary policy preference parameters in a general equilibrium framework. We start from the model presented by Smets and Wouters (2003) for the euro area where, in the original set up, monetary policy behaviour is described...

While the primary causes of the 2007-8 financial crisis are disputed, many economists hold that the monetary policy missteps played a role in causing or prolonging the financial crisis. In light of the perceived failure of monetary orthodoxy, monetary models are being theoretically refined and...

Inflation targeting involves using all available information in stabilizing inflation around some target rate (Svensson, 2003). Inflation is typically at the very end of the transmission mechanism and hence its determination is subject to much model uncertainty which the central bank will want...

The case for central bank independence is built on an intellectual two-step. Step one argues there is a problem of inflation prone government. Step two argues independence is the solution to that problem. This paper challenges that case and shows it is based on false politics and economics. The...