In a surprisingly growing number of regions in Germany private "regional currencies" are issued as a cash substitute for the euro. Currently, these regional currencies are conceived almost exclusively as Schwundgeld (depreciative currency), which loses value on a predetermined timescale. This...

It is widely believed that the Fed controls the funds rate by altering the degree of pressure in the reserve market through open market operations when it changes its target for the federal funds rate. Recently, however, several economists have suggested that open market operations may not be...

This paper assesses the performance of monetary indicators in predicting euro area HICP inflation out-of-sample over the period since the start of EMU considering a wide range of forecasting models, including standard bivariate forecasting models, factor models, simple combination forecasts as...

This paper investigates the transmission of monetary policy in the euro area based on the factor augmented vector autoregressive approach of Bernanke, Boivin and Eliasz (2005) as well as on a standard VAR model. We focus on the reaction of monetary aggregates to a one-off monetary policy shock....

Our paper studies the relationship between money growth and consumer price inflation in the euro area using wavelet analysis. Wavelet analysis allows to account for variations in the money growth-inflation relationship both across the frequency spectrum and across time. We find evidence of...

We present a comparable set of results on the monetary transmission channels on firm investment for the four largest euro-area countries (Germany, France, Italy and Spain). With particularly rich micro datasets for each country containing over 215,000 observations from 1985 to 1999, we explore...

This paper develops a theoretical model of dynamic decision-making of a monetary policy committee with heterogeneous members. It investigates the optimal transparency, and the optimal way of transmitting information of committees, by analysing the effects different communication strategies have...

This paper evaluates the consequences of accelerated technical progress for monetary transmission and the speed of adjustment in the real economy. With a decreasing service life, the long term rate relevant to real demand will resemble more closely the money market rate. We make the investment...

Rajan and Zingales (1998) use U.S. Compustat firm data for the 1980s to obtain measures of manufacturing sectors? Dependence on External Finance (DEF). They take any differences in these measures to be structural/technological and thus applicable to other countries. Their joint assumptions about...