This paper views the policy response to the recent financial crisis from the perspective of Milton Friedman's monetary economics. Five major aspects of the policy response were: 1) discount window lending was provided broadly to the financial system, at rates that were low in relation to the...

Woodford (2003) describes a popular class of neo-Wicksellian models in which monetary policy is characterized by an interest-rate rule, and the money market and financial institutions are typically not even modelled. Critics contend that these models are incomplete and unsuitable for...

In this paper, we study the role played by central bank communication in monetary policy transmission. We employ the Swiss Economic Institute’s Monetary Policy Communicator to measure the future stance of the European Central Bank’s monetary policy. Our results indicate, first, that...

This Paper considers the role of monetary aggregates in modern macroeconomic models of the New Keynesian type. The focus is on possible developments of these models that are suggested by the monetarist literature, and that in addition seem justified empirically. Both the relation between money...

This paper investigates the differences between real-time and ex-post output gap estimates using a newly-constructed international real-time dataset over the period from 1973:Q1 to 2012:Q3. We extend the findings in Orphanides and van Norden (2002) for the United States that the use of ex-post...

This paper studies the trade-offs between stabilizing CPI inflation and alternative measures of the output gap in Ramses, the Riksbank׳s estimated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model of a small open economy. Our main finding is that the trade-off between stabilizing CPI...

In this paper we study asymmetries in the Taylor rule for the United States during the 1970–2012 period. We show that monetary authorities have been constantly concerned with excess demand in overheated periods – when the output gap is positive or the unemployment rate falls below 7% or 7.5%...

By using a dynamic factor model, we can substantially improve the reliability of real-time output gap estimates for the U.S. economy. First, we use a factor model to extract a series for the common component in GDP from a large panel of monthly real-time macroeconomic variables. This series is...

This paper provides real time evidence on the usefulness of the euro area output gap as a leading indicator for inflation and growth. A genuine real-time data set for the euro area is used, including vintages of several alternative gap estimates. It turns out that, despite some difference across...

This paper provides evidence on the reliability of euro area real-time output gap estimates, including those provided by the IMF, OECD and EC and a set of model based measures. A genuine real-time data set is used, including vintages of several sets of euro area output gap estimates available...