Challenging the conventional wisdom that structural problems are to blame for the euro area’s protracted domestic demand stagnation, this paper sets out to shed some fresh light on the role of the ECB in the ongoing EMU crisis. Contrary to the widely held interpretation of the ECB as an...

Inflation is a far from homogeneous phenomenon, but this fact is ignored in most work on consumer price inflation. Using a novel methodology grounded in theory, the ten sub-components of the consumer price index (excluding mortgage interest rates, or CPIX) for South Africa are modeled separately...

We build a 4-equation model of the inflation process in South Africa (which has recently adopted inflation targeting), including the exchange rate, consumer prices, producer price, and import prices. This provides useful information on the speed and extent of exchange rate pass- through, and...

The goal of this paper is to provide a fair empirical comparison of two alternative explanations of the relationship between aggregate price and output. We compare the empirical performance of the sticky price and the Mankiw and Reis (2002) sticky information models. We put both models in a...

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What generates persistence in inflation? Is inflation persistence structural? This paper investigates learning as a potential source of persistence in inflation. The paper focuses on the price-setting problem of firms and presents a model that nests structural sources of persistence (indexation)...

Successful descriptions of the short-term nominal interest rate inertial behavior have frequently been obtained with small scale macro models in which a Central Banker minimizes a loss function containing an argument labelled as interest rate smoothing. The rationale for this argument is not...

We study the behavior of real exchange rates in a two­country dynamic equilibrium model. In this model, consumers can only consume domestic goods but can invest costlessly in capital stocks of both countries. Nevertheless, transporting goods between the two countries is costly and, hence, the...

Credit risk models like Moody’s KMV are now well established in the market and give bond managers reliable estimates of default probabilities for individual firms. Until now it has been hard to relate those probabilities to the actual credit spreads observed on the market for corporate bonds....

This paper proposes an estimate of the Hungarian real exchange rate=20 misalignments using fractionally integrated threshold models (FI-STARMA and=20= FI-TARMA=20 processes). This allows us to simultaneously take into account two types of=20 persistence: a long memory behavior due to the...