Several industrialised countries have had a similar inflation experience in the past 30 years, with inflation high and volatile in the 1970s and the 1980s but low and stable in the most recent period. We explore the dynamics of inflation in these countries via a time-varying factor model. This...

How does a monetary union work when labour markets are heterogeneous? Since shocks are transmitted via both trade links and the common monetary policy and propagated via labour market responses, it follows that labour market institutions may have not only national but also union-wide...

This paper takes a first step in analysing how a monetary union performs in the presence of labour market asymmetries. Differences in wage flexibility, market power and country sizes are allowed for in a setting with both country-specific and aggregate shocks. The implications of asymmetries for...

I estimate the dynamic effects of respectively traditional interest rate innovations and unconventional monetary policy actions on the Euro area economy. The results show that the Eurosystem can stimulate the economy beyond the policy rate by increasing the size of its balance sheet. The...

This paper uses a data-set including time series data on macroeconomic variables, loans, deposits and interest rates for the euro area in order to study the features of financial intermediation over the business cycle. We find that stylized facts for aggregate monetary and real variables are...

Understanding how import prices adjust to exchange rates helps anticipate inflation effects and monetary policy responses. This paper examines exchange rate passthrough to the monthly import price index in South Africa during 1980-2009. A methodological innovation allows various short-run...

It is sometimes argued that central banks influence the private economy in the short run through controlling a specific component of high powered money, not its total amount. Using a structural VAR approach, this paper evaluates this claim empirically, in the context of the Japanese economy. It...

This paper introduces a new indicator of core inflation for New Zealand, estimated using a dynamic factor model and disaggregate consumer price data. Using disaggregate consumer price data we can directly compare the predictive performance of our core indicator with a wide range of other ‘core...