While monetary targeting has become increasingly rare, many central banks attach weight to money growth in setting interest rates. This raises the issue of how money can be combined with other variables, in particular the output gap, when analysing inflation. The Swiss National Bank emphasises...

We study the responses of residential property and equity prices, inflation and economic activity to monetary policy shocks in 17 countries, using data spanning 1986-2006, using single-country VARs and panel VARs in which we distinguish between groups of countries depending on their financial...

Recently, the Bank of Japan outlined a two perspectives approach to the conduct of monetary policy that focuses on risks to price stability over different time horizons. Interpreting this as pertaining to different frequency bands, we use band spectrum regression to study the determination of...

We study the determinants of sovereign bond spreads in the euro area since the introduction of the euro. We show that an aggregate risk factor is a main driver of spreads. This factor also plays an important indirect role for risk spreads through its interaction with the size and structure of...

We investigate the impact of EMU on macroeconomic volatility. The volatilities of inflation and nominal interest rates have declined, as has, more importantly, the volatility of real consumption growth. Since global volatility has fallen for reasons unrelated to EMU (the “great...

This paper estimates a monetary policy reaction function for the ECB over the period 1999-2009. To allow for a potential shift in interest rate setting during the financial crisis, we permit a smooth transition from one set of parameters to another. The estimates show a swift change in the...

At the upcoming G20 meetings the issue what can be done to avoid a repetition of the current deep financialcrisis will again be debated. Much attention and criticism will be directed to central banks. That is unavoidable: central banks must never again permit the development of financial...

We test the menu cost model of Ball and Mankiw (1994, 1995), which impliesthat the impact of price dispersion on inflation should differ between inflation anddeflation episodes, using data for Japan and Hong Kong. We use a random crosssectionsample split when calculating the moments of the...

I estimate a reaction function for the ECB using an ordered logit model for the period 1999-2009. Allowing for a smooth transition from one set of parameters to another, I detect a rapid change in the middle of 2008.