One of the most important questions facing the Federal Reserve (Fed) is also one of the hardest for it to answer: What is the current stance of monetary policy? The answer to this question is straightforward in theory, but is quite challenging to apply in practice. Despite many valiant efforts...

This paper addresses the relative importance of monetary indicators for forecasting inflation in the euro area in a Bayesian framework. Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA)based on predictive likelihoods provides a framework that allows for the estimation of inclusion probabilities of a particular...

This paper applies a SVAR model which combines different monetary policy instruments to construct an alternative indicator of monetary policy stance in Macedonia. It employs the approach introduced by Bernanke and Mihov (1998) of isolating monetary policy shocks from the whole set of monetary...

This paper uses monthly data from April 2005 to August 2013 for Taiwan to propose a novel tourism indicator, namely the Tourism Conditions Index (TCI). TCI accounts for the spillover weights based on the Granger causality test and estimates of the multivariate BEKK model for four TCI indicators...

We extend the framework in Andrle and others (2013) to incorporate an explicit role for money targets and target misses in the analysis of monetary policy in low-income countries (LICs), with an application to Kenya. We provide a general specification that can nest various types of money...

The natural interest rate is of great relevance to central banks, but it is difficult to measure. We show that in a standard microfounded monetary model, the natural interest rate co-moves with a transformation of the money demand that can be computed from actual data. The co-movement is of a...

Pacific Islands countries are vulnerable to commodity price shocks, and this poses challenges to monetary policy. The high degree of exchange rate pass-through to headline inflation and the weak monetary transmission mechanism in PICs suggest a greater efficacy of exchange rate changes in...

The authors construct an index of leading indicators for inflation, the composition of which can change over time in response to changing economic conditions. The index helps recognize and predict major swings in inflation

The Federal Reserve Board's P-Star inflation forecasting model predicts changes in inflation from the gap between actual and equilibrium prices. The model has a distinguished history. Quantity theorists from David Hume to Milton Friedman have long used versions of it to explain how money stock...

Nach der jüngsten Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise kamen verstärkt Forderungen auf, die Geldpolitik solle zur frühzeitigen Erkennung von Finanzmarktungleichgewichten verstärkt auf monetäre Variablen ihr Augenmerk richten. Der vorliegende Beitrag zeigt, dass diese Überlegung wohl begründet...

This paper outlines a new method for using qualitative information to analyze the monetary policy strategy of central banks. Quantitative assessment indicators that are extracted from a central bank's public statements via the balance statistic approach are employed to estimate a Taylor-type...

The monetary conditions index is a composite index of interest and exchange rates frequently used by central banks, the International Monetary Fund, and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. This paper considers the benefits and weaknesses of the monetary conditions index in...

We argue that monetary policies in euro-candidate countries should also aim at mitigating excessive instability of the key target and instrument variables of monetary policy during turbulent market periods. Our empirical tests show a significant degree of leptokurtosis, thus prevalence of...

The past years were characterized by unprecedented rises in prices of commodities such as oil or wheat and inflation rates moved up above the mark of two percent per annum. This led to a revival of the debate whether commodity prices indicate future CPI inflation and if they can be used as...

This paper examines the forecasting performance of a broad monetary aggregate (M3) in predicting euro area inflation. Excess liquidity is measured as the difference between the actual money stock and its fundamental value, the latter determined by a money demand function. The out-of sample...

We develop a time-varying transition probabilities Markov Switching model in which inflation is characterised by two regimes (high and low inflation). Using Bayesian techniques, we apply the model to the euro area, Germany, the US, the UK and Canada for data from the 1960s up to the present. Our...

This paper examines the forecasting performance of a broad monetary aggregate (M3) in predicting euro area inflation. Excess liquidity is measured as the difference between the actual money stock and its fundamental value, the latter determined by a money demand function. The out-of sample...

This paper investigates the possibility of constructing a composite leading indicator (CLI) of Tunisian inflation. For doing so, partial information about future inflation rate provided by a number of basic series is analyzed first. Based on the correlation analysis, a few of these basic series...