In this paper, we review the German practice of imputing the costs of owner-occupied housing by increasing the relative weight of actual rents in the CPI. As the structure of owner-occupied housing differs substantially from that of rental housing, this variant of the imputation method may cause...

We analyse the adjustment of retail and services prices in a period of low inflation, using a set of individual price data from the German Consumer Price Index which covers the years 1998 to 2003. We strong find evidence of time- and state-dependent price adjustment. Most importantly, the...

In several studies, hedonic methods have been used successfully for the ex post assessment of the accuracy of inflation measurement. Most of those studies relate to high-tech products, with respect to which traditional methods of compiling price indices often fail. We apply hedonic methods to...

Structural VAR studies disagree with narrative accounts about the history of monetary policy disturbances. We investigate whether employing the narrative monetary shock account as a proxy variable in a VAR model aligns both shock series. We quantify the extent to which the disagreement still...

What are the effects of a higher central bank inflation target on the burden of real public debt? Several recent proposals have suggested that even a moderate increase in the inflation target can have a pronounced effect on real public debt. We consider this question in a New Keynesian model...

This paper studies the importance of money for inflation in the euro area. An inflation equation is derived from a small model that combines the supply and demand for money with a Phillips curve and the assumption that inflation expectations develop adaptively. The model's solution attributes an...

In this paper we incorporate a labor market with matching frictions and wage rigidities into the New Keynesian business cycle model. In particular, we analyze the effect of a monetary policy shock and investigate how labor market frictions affect the transmission process of monetary policy. The...

This paper examines the methods used by the Bank of Japan for the estimation of the output gap. Attention is paid to the real-time estimation problem. After reviewing the evolution of output gap estimation at the Bank, I discuss advantages and disadvantages of the various output gap measures....

In this paper an anti-cyclical fiscal policy rule is introduced into a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with New-Keynesian features. The rule allows the deficit to deviate from target in proportion to the impact of automatic stabilisers while any additional impact on the deficit, for...

In this paper we estimate a simple New-Keynesian DSGE model with German data for the sample period 1970:q1 to 1998:q4. Contrary to a number of recent similar papers estimated with US and euro-area data, we find that real money balances contribute significantly to the determination of inflation...