The paper investigates the impact of US quantitative easing (QE) on global non-financial corporate bond issuance. It distinguishes between two QE instruments, MBS/GSE debt and Treasury bonds, and disentangles between two channels of transmission of QE to global bond markets, namely flow effects...

The paper analyses the global spillovers of the Federal Reserve’s unconventional monetary policy measures. First, we find that Fed measures in the early phase of the crisis (QE1) were highly effective in lowering sovereign yields and raising equity markets, especially in the US relative to...

This paper assumes that a central bank commits itself to maintaining an inflation target and then asks what measure of the inflation rate the central bank should use if it wants to maximize economic stability. The paper first formalizes this problem and examines its microeconomic foundations. It...

There is a broad consensus in the literature that costs of information processing and acquisition may generate costly disagreements in expectations among economic agents, and that central banks may play a central role in reducing such dispersion in expectations. This paper analyses empirically...

This paper first shows that the forecast error incurred when assuming that future inflation will be equal to the inflation target announced by the central bank is typically at least as small and often smaller than forecast errors of model-based and published inflation forecasts. It then shows...

This paper shows that the credibility gain from permanently committing to a fixed exchange rate by joining the European Monetary Union can outweigh the loss from giving up independent monetary policy. When the central bank enjoys only limited credibility a pegged exchange rate regime yields a...

This paper proposes a procedure to investigate the nature and persistence of the forces governing the yield curve and to use the extracted information for forecasting purposes. The latent factors of a model of the Nelson-Siegel type are directly linked to the maturity of the yields through the...

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...