This study reports the outcome of an effort to collect market price data for Norway with a view to constructing monthly price indices from the year 1777 to 1920. The material covers data on commodity prices from agriculture, shery, dairying, manufacturing and mining. Indices of the wholesale and...

This paper examines the impact of different types of oil price shocks on the U.S. economy, using a factor-augmented VAR (FAVAR) approach. The results indicate that when examining the effects of oil price shocks, it is important to account for the interaction between the oil market and the...

The paper presents an incomplete competition model (ICM), where inflation is determined jointly with unit labour cost growth. The ICM is estimated on data for the Euro area and evaluated against existing models, i.e. the implicit inflation equation of the Area Wide model (AWM) - cf. Fagan, Henry...

We investigate optimal horizons for targeting inflation in response to different shocks and their properties under alternative preferences of an inflation-targeting central bank. Our analysis is based on a well specified macroeconometric model of Norway, but we examine how alternative...

I document price adjustments in both high and low inflation years from 14 milllion monthly price observations of 1,133 goods and services. The variation in the frequency of price changes explains all the variation in the inflation rate. On average, prices increase more often when inflation is...

According to a Keynesian view, short term output fluctuations are normally demand side led. Since prices reflect demand, they should mirror output fluctuations. Thus, prices and output are expected to move in the same direction in the short run. The present paper investigates the historical...

In the 1870s the three Scandinavian countries Denmark, Norway and Sweden formed the Scandinavian Currency Union. Both the adoption of gold and the monetary union were supposed to lead to price stability in and between these countries. By drawing on new indices of consumer prices the present...

This paper revisits ination forecasting using reduced form Phillips curve forecasts, i.e., inflation forecasts using activity and expectations variables. We propose a Phillips curve-type model that results from averaging across different regression specifications selected from a set of potential...

The Taylor Principle is often used to explain macroeconomic stability (see, e.g., Clarida et al. 2000). The reason is that this simple principle guarantees determinacy, i.e., local uniqueness of rational expectations equilibrium, in many New Keynesian models. However, analyses of determinacy are...

With sticky prices, optimizing agents and money in the utility function, I derive the exact analytical solution for optimal monetary policy given a zero lower bound (ZLB) on the interest rate. The Phillips curve is Neo-Classical, and the ZLB is then not a constraint on optimal policy. Optimal...