Traditional Taylor rules, which are estimated using a level specification linking the short-term interest rate to inflation and the output gap, are unstable when estimated on euro area data and forecast poorly out of sample. We present an alternative reaction function which takes the...

On several occasions during the period 2001-2003, the European Central Bank (ECB) decided to deviate from its "neutral" benchmark allotment rule, with the effect of not alleviating a temporary liquidity shortage in the banking system. This is remarkable because it implied the possibility of...

We examine the euro area monetary policy transmission process using post-1999 data, with two main questions in mind: has it changed after u0096 and because of u0096 EMU and, if so, is it becoming homogeneous across countries. Given the data limitations, we concentrate on three blocks of...

Announcing a quantitative objective for price developments has become a common practice in modern monetary policy making. While the specific features of such announced objectives vary across countries, a common rationale for this is to help anchoring inflation expectations. We use survey data on...

This paper provides a simple weekly model of the regular supply of liquidity in the euro area, with a view to understanding the functioning of the euro area money market. The main result of the analysis is that liquidity has normally been provided by the ECB in a neutral and smooth manner, but...

In the paper we propose a new methodological approach to core in- flation estimation, based on a frequency domain principal components estimator, suited to estimate systems of fractionally cointegrated processes. The proposed core inflation measure is the scaled common persistent factor in...

This paper investigates the performance of optimised interest rate rules when there is uncertainty about a key determinant of the monetary transmission mechanism, namely the degree of persistence characterising the inflation process. The paper focuses on the euro area and utilises two variants of...

This paper estimates the factors underlying the volatility of the euro overnight interest rate and its transmission along the euro area money market yield curve. A new multivariate unobserved components model is proposed allowing for both long-memory and stationary cyclical dynamics. Using...

This monthly monetary model for the euro area is gradually constructed from its two constituting components: a money demand and a loan demand model which both include the relation between the respective retail bank rates and the short-term market interest rate. Eventually, the encompassing...

We propose a method for estimating a subset of the parameters of a structural rational expectations model by exploiting changes in policy. We define a class of models, midway between a vector autoregression and a structural model, that we call the recoverable structure. As an application of our...