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...

New Keynesian models of the business cycle have become the new paradigm of monetary economics, often used for policy analysis. This paper shows that this class of models fail in one crucial respect: they imply a strong negative contemporaneous correlation between inflation and output....

Using an optimisation-based model with endogenous labour supply and a proportional tax rate, we compare the stabilising properties of different fiscal policy rules. The economy is affected by shocks from both government spending and technology. The fiscal policy rule can be based on government...

Liquidity traps occur when the natural nominal interest rate becomes negative. In a model with capital price dynamics explicitly considered, we find that shocks in the future can cause current and lasting liquidity traps. We propose that the central bank can prevent or fix liquidity traps by...

This paper introduces a general objective function for monetary policy that abandons certainty equivalence and features 'prudence'. It provides an alternative explanation for the positive relation between the level and variability of inflation, both across countries and over time. In particular,...

This paper describes the Federal Reserve's analytical framework under Volcker and Greenspan, as it was constructed in the early 1980s, during a period of high inflation. It traces the modeling and policy implications of this framework. It discusses the Fed's actual track record and the state of...

Using quarterly data for the period since 1987 this paper explores, in the context of a small model of the EU economy, the degree to which monetary policy has been asymmetric. It shows in particular that monetary policy has been much more responsive to threats that inflation would lie outside...

The paper presents a structural model framework for a small open economy. The model, based on optimising households and firms, has been calibrated on Czech macroeconomic data in order to develop an analytic framework suitable for analysing key policy questions related to the Czech Republic’s...

The paper offers a new explanation for the cause of the Great Inflation by constructing a model that explicitly separates the roles of government and monetary policymakers. A mechanism that inflation can accelerate even if an inflation target is low is uncovered. The model solves the puzzle of...

This paper analyses the role of inflation expectations in the euro area. On one hand, the question is how inflation expectations affect both inflation and output, and, on the other hand, how inflation expectations reflect developments in these variables. The analyses make use of a simple VAR...