Monetary union can benefit countries suffering from policy credibility problems if it eliminates the inflation bias and also allows for more efficient management of certain shocks. But it also carries costs as some stabilization may be feasible even in the absence of credibility, and this may be...

The advent and spread of information and communication technologies (ICTs) increase potential output growth . It is uncertain to what extent and for how long they do so. We use the term "new economy" (NE) to describe the acceleration in potential output growth and the attendant and partly...

In this paper, we try to illustrate the interest of the Bayesian approach for the evaluation of economic policies, often realised by analysing the response of the economy to a standard shock. We present a Stochastic Dynamic General Equilibrium model for the euro area. The Bayesian estimation...

This paper incorporates banks as well as frictions in the market for bank capital into a standard New Keynesian model and considers the positive and normative implications of various financial shocks. It shows that the frictions matter significantly for the effects of the shocks and the...

In this article, we analyze the US short term real interest rate series for the last five decades in the framework of a M-SETAR model (Momentum - Self Exciting Threshold Auto-Regressive). With the aim of disentangling the non-linearity from the non-stationarity cases, we use threshold...

The recent boom in housing markets of most developed economies has spurred criticism that inflation targeting central banks may have neglected the build-up of financial imbalances. This paper provides a formal empirical test of such claims, using a standard program evaluation methodology to...

Using a large database of bank financial statements, this paper investigates the determinants of the bank lending channel (BLC) of monetary transmission in Brazil between 1995 and 2012. I extend the standard empirical approach in two main ways. First, I apply a micro-founded strategy for...

A number of recent papers point to the importance of distinguishing between the price reaction to micro and macro shocks in order to reconcile the volatility of individual prices with the observed persistence of aggregate inflation. We emphasize instead the importance of distinguishing between...

This note estimates several constrained versions of an optimization-based multi-country model to test the sources of heterogeneity within the euro area. We show that the main source is the asymmetry of shocks affecting the economies and that the heterogeneity of behaviors does not seem to be of...

We document the presence of both small and large price changes in individual price records from the CPI in France and the US. After correcting for measurement error and cross-section heterogeneity, the size-distribution of price changes has a positive excess kurtosis. We propose an analytical...