What monetary policy framework, if adopted by the Federal Reserve, would have avoided the Great Inflation of the 1960s and 1970s? We use counterfactual simulations of an estimated model of the U.S. economy to evaluate alternative monetary policy strategies. We show that policies constructed...

The Paper looks for evidence of grease and sand effects in Europe, in particular the possibility that the natural rate of unemployment is affected by the inflation rate. Looking at four countries, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, the Paper reports some preliminary evidence that...

A central tenet of inflation targeting is that establishing and maintaining well-anchored inflation expectations are essential. In this paper, we reexamine the role of key elements of the inflation targeting framework towards this end, in the context of an economy where economic agents have an...

This paper uses a comparative and historical framework to evaluate the growth performance of the West German economy from the beginning of the post-war period in 1945 to the reunification of Germany in 1990. Cross-country growth equations are used at the outset to provide a benchmark against...

The paper addresses the following questions. Does bank lending comprise a relatively large amount of finance for investment in Germany, and, if so, is this a consequence of bank representation on companies' supervisory boards (which, it is argued, reduces information asymmetries)? How strong is...

The Paper examines real and nominal wage rigidities. We estimate a switching regime model, in which the observed distribution of individual wage changes, computed from West German register data for 1976-97, is generated by simultaneous processes of real, nominal or no wage rigidity, and...

This paper studies a simple New-Keynesian model of fiscal and monetary policy coordination when the policymaker acts under commitment. With a New Keynesian Phillips curve it is optimal to control inflation only through the use of monetary policy. But, when price-setters use a Steinsson (2003)...

The Friedman rule states that steady-state welfare is maximized when there is deflation at the real rate of interest. Recent work by Khan et al. (2003) uses a richer model but still finds deflation optimal. In an otherwise standard new Keynesian model we show that, if households have hyperbolic...

This paper surveys the research in the past decade on imperfect information models of aggregate supply and the Phillips curve. This new work has emphasized that information is dispersed and disseminates slowly across a population of agents who strategically interact in their use of information....

Recent cross-country studies on the globalization and output-inflation tradeoff correlation find openness has no significant effect on OECD countries. Those studies assume parameter constancy across countries. In this paper, we argue that this assumption does not hold for major industrialized...