Conjectures about inflation expectations are inextricably linked to our understanding of the relationship between the real and monetary sides of the economy; yet, direct empirical research on the matter has been scarce at best. This paper therefore examines the empirical properties of inflation...

The Eurosystem has been pursuing a crisis management policy for more than four years now. This policy aims primarily at maintaining financial stability in the euro area by providing vast liquidity support to commercial banks that are operating in nationally segmented banking systems. As a side...

Credit relationships between commercial banks and quoted firms are studied for the structure and its temporal change from the year 1980 to 2005. At each year, the credit network is regarded as a weighted bipartite graph where edges correspond to the relationships and weights refer to the amounts...

We examine both the degree and the structural stability of inflation persistence at different quantiles of the conditional inflation distribution. Previous research focused exclusively on persistence at the conditional mean of the inflation rate. As economic theory provides reasons for inflation...

Two theoretical modeis are developed. One describes the behavior of monetary policy before elections, in case of policy instruments being controlled by the government. The other one discusses the effects of a change in the ruling party, if parties differ in the weight they attribute to Inflation...

Two theoretical modeis are developed. Both describe the connection between public debt and inflation. In the first one, monetary policy inflates the economy to rcduce the bürden of existing debt. In the second one, the causality runs directly from the level of public debt to inflation via a...

A theoretical model is developed to describe the behavior of dependent and independent central banks. In an empirical test, the reaction functions of six central banks of industrial countries with different degrees of independence are estimated using an error correction framework. In shock...

Monetary policy rule parameters estimated with conventional estimation techniques can be severely biased if the estimation sample includes periods of low interest rates. Nominal interest rates cannot be negative, so that censored regression methods like Tobit estimation have to be used to...

This paper studies the effects of ECB communications about unconventional monetary policy operations on the perceived sovereign risk of Italy over the last five years. More than fifty events concerning non-standard operations are identified and classified with respect to the specific ECB...