A puzzle from the Great Recession is an apparent mismatch between a fall in the persistence of European inflation rates, and the increased variability of expert forecasts of inflation. We explain this puzzle and show how country specific beliefs about inflation are still quite close to the...

In this paper, we aim to understand how monetary policy is conducted in China and what the main sources of fluctuations in China’s business cycle are. To this end, we extend a standard New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with financial frictions and investment-specific...

We consider the fiscal multiplier and spillover in an environment in which two countries are caught simultaneously in a liquidity trap. Using a standard New Open Economy Macroeconomics (NOEM) model, an optimizing two-country sticky price model, we show that the fiscal multiplier and spillover...

Central to the conduct of monetary policy are inflation forecasts. Inflation forecast are not unique. Central banks and professional organizations generate inflation forecasts while households are surveyed about their inflation outlook. This paper estimates inflation forecast disagreement for...

This paper examines the sources of Australia's business cycle fluctuations focusing on the role of international shocks and short run stabilization policy. A VAR model identified using robust sign restrictions derived from an estimated structural model is used to aid the investigation. The...

We introduce financial market friction through search and matching in the loan market into a standard New Keynesian model. We reveal that the second order approximation of social welfare includes the terms related to credit, such as credit market tightness, the volume of credit, and the loan...

One way of evaluating how well monetary authorities perform is to provide the public with a regular and independent second opinion. The European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England (BoE) are shadowed by professional and academic economists who provide a separate policy rate recommendation...

An important requirement, prior to countries’ adopting a common currency or maintaining an independent monetary policy, is establishing the extent to which they share a common economic cycle and how susceptible they are to region-specific shocks. For example, Kouparitsas (2001) has examined...

We examine policy rate recommendations of the Bank of Canada’s Governing Council (GC) and its shadow, the C.D. Howe Institute’s Monetary Policy Council (MPC). Individual recommendations of the MPC are observed but not those of the GC. Differences in the two committee’s recommendations are...