Papers estimating the reaction function of the Bundesbank generally find that its monetary policy from the 1970s to 1998 can well be captured by a standard Taylor rule according to which the central bank responds to the output gap and to deviations of inflation from target, but not to monetary...

National accounts data are always revised. Not only recent data, but also figures dating many years back can be revised substantially. This means that there is a danger that an important part of the central bank's information set is flawed for a long period of time. In this paper we present a...

Recently, a number of studies have made an attempt to deal with the key issue of the incompleteness of information available to the central bank when taking its monetary policy decisions. This study adds to this literature by tackling the problem with regard to the euro area. The analysis is...

I analyze how the introduction of financial frictions can affect the trade-off between output stabilization and inflation stability and whether, in the presence of financial frictions, the optimal outcome can be realized or approached more closely if monetary policy is allowed to react to...

This paper re-investigates the implications of monetary policy rules on changes in exchange rate, in a risk-adjusted, uncovered interest parity model with unrestricted parameters, emphasizing the importance of modeling market expectations of monetary policy. I use consensus forecasts as a proxy...

This paper examines the methods used by the Bank of Japan for the estimation of the output gap. Attention is paid to the real-time estimation problem. After reviewing the evolution of output gap estimation at the Bank, I discuss advantages and disadvantages of the various output gap measures....

This paper estimates standard and extended Taylor rules for core countries in the euro area, namely France, Germany and Italy, as well as for the ECB. Forward, backward and forecast-based rules are estimated for a variety of samples since the late 1970s. We are particularly interested in the...

We start from the assertion that a useful monetary policy design should be founded on more realistic assumptions about what policymakers can know at the time when policy decisions have to be made. Since the Taylor rule - if used as an operational device - implies a forward looking behaviour, we...