During the last years, a number of countries have adopted formal inflation targeting (IT) monetary policy frameworks in a context of global inflation moderation. This paper studies inflation dynamics in eight Latin American countries, some of which have adopted formal targets. We analyze...

We study simple fiscal rules for stabilizing the government debt level in response to asymmetric demand shocks in a country that belongs to a currency union. We compare debt stabilization through tax rate adjustments with debt stabilization through expenditure changes. While rapid and flexible...

This paper considers a dynamic matching model with imperfectly observable worker effort. In equilibrium, the wage distribution is truncated from below by a no-shirking condition. This downward wage rigidity induces the same type of inefficient churning and "contractual fragility" as in Ramey and...

Taking into account two salient Spanish stylized facts, namely, a persistent disinflationary process and hysteresis in the unemployment, this paper tries to answer the following question: Is a nominal permanent disinflation compatible with short-run unemployment costs but also with long-run...

The co-movements of labor productivity with output, total hours, vacancies and unemployment have changed since the mid 1980s. This paper offers an explanation for the sharp break in the fl uctuations of labor market variables based on endogenous labor supply decisions following the mortgage...

In a search and matching environment, this paper assesses a range of modeling setups against macro evidence for the monetary transmission mechanism in the euro area. In particular, we assess right-to-manage vs. efficient bargaining, flexible vs. sticky wages, interactions at the firm level...

We assess the extent to which the great US macroeconomic stability since the mid-1980s can be accounted for by changes in oil shocks and the oil share in GDP. To do this we estimate a DSGE model with an oil-producing sector before and after 1984 and perform counterfactual simulations. We nest...

This paper presents an analysis of how alternative models of the business cycle can replicate the stylized fact that large governments are associated with less volatile economies. Our analysis shows that adding nominal rigidities and costs of capital adjustment to an otherwise standard RBC model...

An exogenous oil price shock raises inflation and contracts output, similar to a negative productivity shock. In the standard New Keynesian model, however, this does not generate a tradeoff between inflation and output gap volatility: under a strict inflation targeting policy, the output decline...