The increasing weight of open market transactions in central bank operations and the widening use of purchase agreements underlines a progress towards convergence of monetary policy instruments and procedures in EU countries. This paper presents a survey of features of open market operations...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the use of monetary policy instruments and procedures (MPIP) in EU countries. In particular, it focuses on three important issues which arise in this context. Fist, we examine the structural position of the EU money markets. Second , evidence is...

Money demand is probably one of the most extensively studies economic relationships in applied economics. While useful surveys of existing literature are available, much of the attention ahes focused on the United States. However, a considerable number of papers have recently been produced...

Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has transformed Europe and has created an integrated pan-European economy. Much research has focused on understanding this integration process and what benefits and costs it entails. This paper identifies a political economy channel of EMU as the monetary union...

This paper demonstrates how the real-time forecasting accuracy of different Brent oil price forecast models changes over time. We find considerable instability in the performance of all models evaluated and argue that relying on average forecasting statistics might hide important information on...

We investigate the role of economic transparency within the framework of one of Townsend’s models of ‘forecasting the forecasts of others’. The equilibrium has the property that ‘higher order beliefs’ are coordinated into a finite-dimensional setup that is amenable to address monetary...

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...

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...

This paper examines the impact of downward wage rigidity (nominal and real) onoptimal steady-state inflation. For this purpose, we extend the workhorse model ofErceg, Henderson and Levin (2000) by introducing asymmetric menu costs for wagesetting. We estimate the key parameters by simulated...

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,...