Are restrictions on fiscal policy necessary for monetary policy to be able to deliver price stability? When households are Ricardian, the net present value of future fiscal surpluses needs to equate the real value of government debt absent inflation. We show that when households are not...

Interactions between monetary and macroprudential policy are crucial in safeguarding price and financial stability. This study investigates the macroeconomic and financial impacts of monetary and macroprudential policy interactions in South Africa, a leading African economy in developing...

The change in macroeconomic conditions since the ECB's strategy review in 2021 towards an environment characterised by above-target inflation, high interest rates, and renewed concerns about elevated government debt has been a vocal reminder of the intricate interdependencies between monetary...

Orthodox economic theory presents the policy maker with an impossible choice: eradicate unemployment at the cost of undesirable inflation or keep prices stable by maintaining some level of involuntary unemployment. This is the canon, as embodied in the natural rate of unemployment theory and the...

CO2 -Abgaben wie Steuern und Zertifikate als Instrumente der Klimapolitik üben einen starken Effekt auf die gesamtwirtschaftliche Preisentwicklung aus. Eine insbesondere preisstabilitätsgerechte Rückgabe der CO2 -Einnahmen soll dazu beitragen, überschießende Reaktionen von Lohnentwicklung,...

Using individual-level survey data for both advanced economies and emerging markets spanning over 45 years for 42 countries, we show that cohorts who have had higher exposure to past inflationary episodes (levels, as well as to more persistent or to more volatile inflation), systematically...

What are the macroeconomic consequences of a government that is limited in its willingness or ability to raise primary surpluses, and a central bank that accommodates its interest-rate policy to the fiscal conditions? I address this question in a dynamic stochastic sticky-price model with...

This paper analyses economic freedom for a sample of 21 OECD countries over the past 170 years on the basis of a new thoroughly revised Historical Index of Economic Liberty (HIEL). Long-term gains in economic freedom reached two-thirds of its potential maximum. The expansion of economic freedom...

This book contains papers and proceedings presented at a conference that took place at the Bank of Israel (BOI) in July 2022, and a Governors’ Panel held in July 2021. The focus is on inflation, inflation targeting, and various macro and micro aspects of the Israeli economy, along with...

For a quarter of a century, the western world has enjoyed a macroeconomic environment characterized by low and stable inflation. Over the last two years, this benign state has dramatically changed. In America and Europe, inflation has resurged with unexpected vigor. Treated at first by central...

After introducing digital currency, the central bank emerges as a monopolist bank. It then faces an "impossible trinity". To achieve price stability and financial stability, optimal consumption allocation is sacrificed. In this paper, I show that fiscal policy designed in coordination with the...

During the Great Moderation, macroeconomic volatility declined while firm markups increased. We document a causal relationship between volatility and markups due to tacit collusion. We exploit the legalisation of interstate banking as an exogenous decrease in volatility. Using an instrumental...

Since New Zealand adopted Inflation Targeting as a monetary policy in 1990, many countries have adopted inflation targeting. Due to the high accountability and high transparency of central banks under IT policy, it is expected to achieve price stability easily. In this paper, we investigate...

The issue of sustainability has hardly left any sector or area untouched. This also applies to financial markets: the EU Member States are trying to transform their economies into net-zero carbon ones, the Commission has presented a comprehensive action plan on sustainable finance, and the ECB...

How should independent central banks react if pressured by fiscal policymakers? We study an environment with strategic monetary-fiscal interactions where the central bank has a limited degree of commitment to follow policies over time and the fiscal authority has none. We contrast the...

We study whether a central bank should deviate from its objective of price stability to promote financial stability. We tackle this question within a textbook New Keynesian model augmented with capital accumulation and microfounded endogenous financial crises. We compare several interest rate...

This study examined the effect of monetary policy on price stability in Nigeria using a data-rich framework spanning from 1986-2020 with the interest in exploring which of monetary policy has been effective in propelling price stability and how inflation responds to the monetary policy...

The paper discusses what we have learned from last year's currency crises in ERM and the Nordic countries about fixed exchange rates as a means to achieve price stability. After discussing the explanations for the crises, the paper concludes that fixed exchange rates are not a shortcut to price...

We lay out a tractable model for fiscal and monetary policy analysis in a currency union, and analyze its implications for the optimal design of such policies. Monetary policy is conducted by a common central bank, which sets the interest rate for the union as a whole. Fiscal policy is...

One of the focuses of recent literature has been the macroeconomic effects of macroprudential policy instruments. The innovation of this paper is that it studies the effects of transparent macro-prudential policies on price stability. The results presented herein provide the first empirical...

This working paper offers some considerations on the monetary policy framework of the European Central Bank. The trade-offs arising from adopting a point target configuration over a range target one are assessed in terms of their flexibility vs. inflation anchoring properties. This layout is...

The ECB is independent, but it is also accountable to the European parliament (EP). Yet, how the EP has held the ECB accountable has largely been overlooked. This paper starts addressing this gap by providing descriptive statistics of three accountability modalities. The paper highlights three...

The paper considers the role of limits upon the permissible growth of public debt, like those stipulated in the Maastricht treaty, in making price stability possible. It is shown that a certain type of fiscal instability, namely variations in the present value of current and future primary...

We contribute to the debate surrounding central banks and climate change by investigating how extreme temperatures affect medium-term inflation, the primary objective of monetary policy. Using panel local projections for 48 advanced and emerging market economies (EMEs), we study the impact of...

The European Central Bank (ECB) recently proclaimed a more active role for itself in the fight against climate change. Did the European Parliament (EP) play a part in this regard, and if so what was it? To answer this question, this paper builds on a multi-method text analysis of original...

This paper compares the main intersectoral and national agricultural institutions in Russia and Switzerland during the period 2004-2019 and uses data from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), an ordinary least squares model and fixed-effects models to assess the contributions of...

In the communication of the European Central Bank (ECB), the statement that "we act within our mandate" is often referred to. Also among practitioners of the Eurosystem the term "mandate" has become popular. In his Working Paper, Helmut Siekmann analyzes the legal foundation of the tasks and...

The world economy has experienced the largest financial crisis in generations, a global pandemic, and a resurgence in inflation during the first quarter of the 21st century, yielding important insights for central banking. Price stability has important benefits and is the responsibility of a...

This paper studies price stability and debt sustainability when the real rate exceeds trend growth (r g) in a New Keynesian model with endogenous technology growth through R&D. Under debt-stabilizing ("passive") fiscal policy the Taylor principle is not sufficient for determinacy. Instead,...

Die Arbeit schlägt für das Eurosystem als Krisenrecht ein neues Verfahren zum besseren und sicheren Erreichen des Preisstabilitätsziels vor. Dazu knüpft es an hohen Teuerungsraten an. Als ultima ratio sieht es die Bank für Internationalen Zahlungsausgleich (BIZ) als Verwalterin vor, um eine...

The paper discusses several issues related to how monetary policy should be conducted in an era of price stability. Low inflation (with base drift in the price level) and price-level stability (without such base drift) are compared, and a suitable loss function (corresponding to flexible...