This paper reports estimates of monetary policy reaction functions for two sets of countries: the G3 (Germany, Japan and the United States) and the E3 (France, Italy and the United Kingdom). It finds that since 1979 each of the G3 central banks has pursued an implicit form of inflation...

The present Paper provides an overview of recent developments in the analysis of monetary policy in the presence of nominal rigidities. The Paper emphasizes the existence of several dimensions in which the recent literature provides a new perspective on the linkages among monetary policy,...

The purpose of the present Paper is twofold. First, we characterize the Fed’s systematic response to technology shocks and its implications for US output, hours and inflation. Second we evaluate the extent to which those responses can be accounted for by a simple monetary policy rule...

Central banks' projections--i.e. forecasts conditional on a given interest rate path-- are often criticized on the grounds that their underlying policy assumptions are inconsistent with the existence of a unique equilibrium in many forward-looking models. Here I describe three alternative...

Much recent research has focused on the development and analysis of extensions of the New Keynesian framework that model labor market frictions and unemployment explicitly. The present paper describes some of the essential ingredients and properties of those models, and their implications for...

We lay out a tractable model for fiscal and monetary policy analysis in a currency union, and analyse its implications for the optimal design of such policies. Monetary policy is conducted by a common central bank, which sets the interest rate for the union as a whole. Fiscal policy is...

We estimate a forward-looking monetary policy reaction function for the US economy, pre- and post-October 1979. Our results point to substantial differences in the estimated rule across periods. In particular, interest rate policy in the Volcker-Greenspan period appears to have been much more...

We study the gains from increased wage flexibility and their dependence on exchange rate policy, using a small open economy model with staggered price and wage setting. Two results stand out: (i) the impact of wage adjustments on employment is smaller the more the central bank seeks to stabilize...

We estimate the response of stock prices to exogenous monetary policy shocks using a vector-autoregressive model with time-varying parameters. Our evidence points to protracted episodes in which stock prices end up increasing persistently in response to an exogenous tightening of monetary...

I examine the impact of alternative monetary policy rules on a rational asset price bubble, through the lens of an overlapping generations model with nominal rigidities. A systematic increase in interest rates in response to a growing bubble is shown to enhance the fluctuations in the latter,...