In this paper, we revisit the effects of government spending shocks on private aggregate consumption within an estimated New-Keynesian DSGE model of the euro area featuring non-Ricardian households and a relatively detailed fiscal policy set up. Employing Bayesian inference methods, we show that...

We formulate a generalized price-setting framework that incorporates staggered contracts of multiple durations and that enables us to directly identify the influences of nominal vs. real rigidities. Using German macroeconomic data over the period 1975Q1 through 1998Q4 to estimate this framework,...

In this paper, we study the effectiveness of monetary policy in a severe recession and deflation when nominal interest rates are bounded at zero. We compare two alternative proposals for ameliorating the effect of the zero bound: an exchange-rate peg and price-level targeting. We conduct this...

In this paper, we examine the cost of insurance against model uncertainty for the Euro area considering four alternative reference models, all of which are used for policy-analysis at the ECB. We find that maximal insurance across this model range in terms of a Minimax policy comes at moderate...

In this paper we consider expected value and mean variance optimization of a general forward--looking stochastic model. The problem is transformed into a general--nonlinear programming problem by adding extra constraints, which restrict the policy maker to commit to a certain policy. Based on...

This paper considers optimal decision-making in an environment with changing parameters. The decision maker's beliefs regarding these unknown, time-varying parameters are normal distributions and are updated according to Bayes rule. Optimal decisions involve a certain degree of experimentation....

In recent years, a number of researchers have advocated monetary policy rules for setting the short-term nominal interest rate rules in response to forecasts of inflation, rather than recent outcomes of a limited set of macroeconomic variables such as the well-known Taylor rule. Furthermore,...