When the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates binds, monetary policy cannot provide appropriate stimulus. We show that in the standard New Keynesian model, tax policy can deliver such stimulus at no cost and in a time-consistent manner. There is no need to use inefficient policies such as...

How should monetary and fiscal policy react to adverse financial shocks? If monetary policy is constrained by the zero lower bound on the nominal interest rate, subsidising the interest rate on loans is the optimal policy. The subsidies can mimic movements in the interest rate and can therefore...

This paper explores the influence of wage and price staggering on monetary persistence. We show that, for plausible parameter values, wage and price staggering are highly complementary in generating monetary persistence. We do so by proposing the new measure "quantitative persistence," after...

In this paper we argue that the relevant decision for the majority of US households is not the fraction of assets to be held in interest-bearing form, but whether to hold such assets at all (we call this ‘the decision to adopt’ financial technology). We show that the key variable governing...

We examine empirically whether asset prices and exchange rates may be admitted into a standard interest rate rule, using data for the US, the UK and Japan since 1979. Asset prices and exchange rates can be employed as information variables for a standard `Taylor-type' rule or as arguments in an...

We consider standard cash-in-advance monetary models and show that there are interest rate or money supply rules such that equilibria are unique. The existence of these single instrument rules depends on whether the economy has an infinite horizon or an arbitrarily large but finite horizon.

The European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has created a new economic area, larger and closer with respect to the rest of the world. Area-specific shocks are thus more important in EMU than country-specific shocks used to be in the previous states, e.g. in Germany. It is thus not surprising...

This article complements the structural New-Keynesian macro framework with a no-arbitrage affine term structure model. Whereas our methodology is general, we focus on an extended macro-model with unobservable processes for the inflation target and the natural rate of output which are filtered...

In this paper we analyse the impact of monetary policy shocks on the term structure of interest rates in US and Germany. We estimate the term structure of spot rates and of the instantaneous forward rate following the methodology proposed by Svensson(1994). We interpret the instantaneous forward...

Historical estimates of the Fisher effect and the informational content in the yield curve may not be relevant after a change in monetary policy. This paper uses a small dynamic rational expectations model with staggered price setting to study how central bank preferences (and thereby monetary...