This Policy Brief was adapted from a paper written by the three authors and presented by Bruegel Director Jean Pisani-Ferry at the informal ECOFIN Council meetings in Gothenburg, Sweden, on 1 Oct. In the brief, the authors argue that bank recapitalisation and restructuring should be a matter of...

The paper traces the dangers in the closed economy perspective of a monetary policy focused on a domestic inflation goal under a clean float. Field evidence of the damage wrought from this perspective is reinforced by that from a laboratory experiment. The laboratory experiment avoids...

This paper’s field evidence is: (1) many official sectors rapidly forget the damage of the 1982-85 exchange rate liquidity crisis and reverted to what caused that crisis, namely a closed economy clean floats perspective; and (2) the 2006-2008/9 exchange rate liquidity shock would have been more...

After a brief review of classical, Keynesian, New Classical and New Keynesian theories of macroeconomic policy, we assess whether New Keynesian Economics captures the quintessential features stressed by JM Keynes. Particular attention is paid to Keynesian features omitted in New Keynesian...

In this Paper we present a model that combines the second-generation trade-off between costs of maintenance and abandonment with possible balance-sheet problems in the corporate sector. We show how debt levels can move a small economy from a fixed exchange rate to a floating exchange rate...

The link between monetary policy and asset price movements has been of perennial interest to policy makers. In this Paper we consider the potential case for pre-emptive monetary restrictions when asset price reversals can have serious effects on real output. First, we provide some historical...

In this paper we propose a new way to formulate optimal policy based on a quadratic intertemporal welfare function where the dynamic constraint is based on a VAR model of the economy which we call the PVAR method. We argue that the VAR under control should not be derived simply by replacing the...

We examine global economic dynamics under learning in a New Keynesian model in which the interest-rate rule is subject to the zero lower bound. Under normal monetary and fiscal policy, the intended steady state is locally but not globally stable. Large pessimistic shocks to expectations can lead...

This paper disentangles fluctuations in disaggregated prices due to macroeconomic and sectoral conditions using a factor-augmented vector autoregression estimated on a large data set. On the basis of this estimation, we establish eight facts: (1) Macroeconomic shocks explain only about 15% of...

This Paper computes welfare-maximizing monetary and tax policy feedback rules, in a calibrated dynamic general equilibrium model with sticky prices. The government makes exogenous final good purchases, levies a proportional income tax, and issues nominal one-period bonds. A quadratic...