This paper compares two contrasting approaches to robust monetary policy design. The first developed by Hansen and Sargent (2003, 2007) assumes unstructured model uncertainty and uses a minimax robustness criterion to design monetary rules. This contrasts with an older literature that structures...

Short-term fiscal indicators based on public accounts data are often used by European policy makers. They represent one of the main sources of publicly available intra-annual fiscal information. Nevertheless, these indicators have received limited attention from the academic literature analysing...

In this paper, we examine the macroeconomic effects of alternative fiscal consolidation policies in the New Area-Wide Model (NAWM), a two-country open-economy model of the euro area developed at the European Central Bank (cf. Coenen et al., 2007). We model fiscal consolidation as a permanent...

In this paper, we explore the role of labor markets for monetary policy in the euro area in a New Keynesian model in which labor markets are characterized by search and matching frictions. We first investigate to which extent a more flexible labor market would alter the business cycle behaviour...

The move to monetary union in Europe led to convergence of interest rates among the participating countries. This was associated with notable cross-country differences in the behaviour of key macroeconomic aggregates. Compared to the low interest rate countries, former high interest rate...

This paper reviews recent approaches to modeling the labour market and assesses their implications for in.ation dynamics through both their effect on marginal cost and on price-setting behaviour. In a search and matching environment, we consider the following modeling setups: right-to-manage...

This paper aims at providing a detailed analysis of the leading indicator properties of corporate bond spreads for real economic activity in the euro area. In- and out-of-sample predictive content of corporate bond spreads are examined along three dimensions: the bonds’ quality , their term to...

This paper provides a toolkit for extracting accurate information about inflation expectations using inflation-linked bonds. First, we show how to estimate term structures of zero-coupon real rates and break-even inflation rates (BEIRs) in the euro area. This improves the analysis of...

The objective of this paper is to examine the main features of optimal monetary policy within a micro-founded macroeconometric framework. First, using Bayesian techniques, we estimate a medium scale closed economy DSGE for the euro area. Then, we study the properties of the Ramsey allocation...

This paper is concerned with the estimation of euro area potential output growth and its decomposition according to the sources of growth. The growth accounting exercise is based on a multivariate structural time series model which combines the decomposition of total output according to the...