While consumption habits have been utilised as a means of generating a hump shapedoutput response to monetary policy shocks in sticky-price New Keynesian economies,there is relatively little analysis of the impact of habits (particularly, external habits) onoptimal policy. In this paper we...

Liquidity provision through its repo auctions has been one of the main instrumentsof the European Central Bank (ECB) to address the recent tensions infinancial markets since summer 2007. In this paper, we analyse banks’ biddingbehaviour in the ECB’s main refinancing operations (MROs) during...

Using the Consensus Economics dataset with individual expertforecasts from G7 countries we investigate determinants of disagreement (crosssectionaldispersion of forecasts) about six key economic indicators. Disagreementabout real variables (GDP, consumption, investment and unemployment)has a...

Monetary Policy Committees differ in the way the interest rate proposal is preparedand presented in the policy meeting. In this paper we show analytically how differentarrangements could affect the voting behaviour of individual MPC members andtherefore policy outcomes. We then apply our results...

Existing work on wage bargaining (as exemplified by Cukierman and Lippi, 2001) typicallypredicts more aggressive wage setting under monetary union. This insight has not beenconfirmed by the EMU experience, which has been characterised by wage moderation,thereby eliciting criticism from Posen and...

We consider a simple extension of the basic new-Keynesian setup in which we relaxthe assumption of frictionless financial markets. In our economy, asymmetricinformation and default risk lead banks to optimally charge a lending rate above therisk-free rate. Our contribution is threefold. First,...

How do financial markets price new information? This paper analyzes price setting atthe intersection of private and public information, by testing whether and how thereaction of financial markets to public signals depends on the relative importance ofprivate information in agents’ information...

We find evidence of a bank lending channel for the euro area operating via bank risk.Financial innovation and the new ways to transfer credit risk have tended to diminishthe informational content of standard bank balance-sheet indicators. We show thatbank risk conditions, as perceived by...