Over the past two decades, many countries have passed legislation giving more independence to their central banks. This institutional evolution has concerned several developed countries but also developing countries and, is consistent with the Barro and Gordon's theory of time-inconsistent...

Over the last decade, a growing number of emerging countries has adopted inflation targeting as monetary policy framework. In a recent paper, Freedman and Laxton (2009) ask the question “Why Inflation Targeting?”. This paper empirically investigates this question by analyzing a large set of...

This study examines public opinion in 15 European countries, on the proposal to establish an independent European Central Bank (ECB). Using data from Euro- barometer surveys for 1998 to 2000, which included a speci c question on this issue, we show that in ation performance is not su cient to...

This article gives the asymptotic properties of multivariate k-nearest neighbor regression estimators for dependent variables belonging to Rd, d 1. The results derived here permit to provide consistent forecasts, and confidence intervals for time series An illustration of the method is given...

Business surveys are an important element in the analysis of the short-term economic situation because of the timeliness and nature of the information they convey. Especially, surveys are often involved in econometric models in order to provide an early assessment of the current state of the...

This paper presents an overview of the results of a research project on monetary transmission pursued by the Eurosystem, which has analysed micro data on firms and banks in several countries of the euro area in great detail. There is strong empirical support for an interest rate channel working...

In this paper, we set up and test a model of the Euro zone, with a special emphasis on the role of money. The model follows the New Keynesian DSGE framework, money being introduced in the utility function with a non-separability assumption. By using Bayesian estimation techniques, we shed light...

This paper aims to study a suitable policy-mix for a monetary union like the euro area, in a context of financial heterogeneity. It relies on a DSGE model with empirically-justified heterogeneous bank capital channel, with financial shocks, in addition to monetary, budgetary and technological...