This paper analyzes how Japan financed its World War II occupation of Southeast Asia, the transfer of resources to Japan, and the monetary and inflation consequences of Japanese policies. In Malaya, Burma, Indonesia and the Philippines, the issue of military scrip to pay for resources and...

We use Bayesian methods to estimate the preferences of the US Federal Reserve by assuming that monetary policy is performed optimally under commitment since the mid-sixties. For this purpose, we distinguish between three subperiods, i.e. the pre-Volcker, the Volcker-Greenspan and the Greenspan...

We analyze the influence of the Taylor rule on US monetary policy by estimating the policy preferences of the Fed within a DSGE framework. The policy preferences are represented by a standard loss function, extended with a term that represents the degree of reluctance to letting the interest...

Annual house price indices for four Norwegian cities are presented for the period from 1819 to 1989. The indices are constructed on the basis of nominal housing transaction prices compiled from the real property registers of the cities. Existing Norwegian house prices indices generally cover a...

We employ information-gap decision theory to derive a robust monetary policy response to Knightian parameter uncertainty. This approach provides a quantitative answer to the question: For a specified policy, how much can our models and data err or vary, without rendering the outcome of that...

According to the Taylor principle a central bank should adjust the nominal interest rate by more than one for one in response to changes in current in?ation. Most of the existing literature supports the view that by following this simple recommendation a central bank can avoid being a source of...

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...

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...

I provide a generalization of Calvo price setting, to include non-overlapping contracts as a special case and embed this in a small DSGE model. The resulting Generalized Phillips Curve (GPC) nests New-Keynesian and Neoclassical versions. I linearize the model around a potentially non-zero trend...