Policymaking at the Bank of England has provided detailed information on both the decisions of individual members of the Monetary Policy Committee. We consider this decision making process in the context of a model in which inflation forecast targeting is used but there is heterogeneity among...

This paper incorporates heterogeneous agents into a NNS model with nominal inertia. Heterogeneous households are introduced into NNS models to try and reconcile the movements in interest rates, consumption and inflation. The key findings here are that heterogeneity and wage inertia are needed to...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the optimality of the monetary authorities reaction function in the two-area medium size model MARCOS (US and euro areas). The parameters and the horizons of output gap and inflation expectations of the Taylor rule are computed in order to minimise a loss...

This paper investigates the precision of multivariate models of the output gap and considers their implications for the formulation of macroeconomic policy. Multivariate models identify the gap by including information from structural economic relationships, such as Okun's Law, the Phillips...

To date the cointegrating properties and the regime-switching behavior of the term structure are two separate strands of the literature. This paper integrates these lines of research and introduces regime shifts into a cointegrated VAR model. We argue that the short run dynamics of the...

The lack of euro area labour market flexibility is a commonly mentioned issue. In particular, the relatively weak response of wages to high unemployment can pose adjustment problems. We address the issue using extensive simulations of an estimated macro-econometric model for the euro area (the...

We study the role of nonlinear simple rules for monetary policy. We depart from the standard rules proposed by Taylor (1993), and consider a nonlinear rule for the so-called opportunistic approach to disinflation originally proposed by Orphanides and Wilcox (2002) and Aksoy, Orphanides, Small,...

Recent evidence by Bils and Klenow (2004) and Klenow and Kryvstov (2003) shows that the average price duration for US CPI-basket goods is in the order of one to two quarters, challenging the monetary business cycle research to try and explain how short price durations can nevertheless generate a...