Monetary policy is often analysed in terms of simple rules. Such rules may be useful for many purposes, even when they do not describe the actual monetary policy strategy exactly. This paper compares monetary policy in Sweden during the inflation-targeting regime 19932002 with the policies...

"Leaning against the wind" – a tighter monetary policy than necessary for stabilizing inflation around the inflation target and unemployment around a long-run sustainable rate – has been justified as a way of reducing household indebtedness. In a recent paper Lars Svensson claims that this...

Factor models of disaggregate inflation indices suggest that sectoral shocks generate the bulk of sectoral inflation variance, but no persistence. Aggregate shocks, by contrast, are the root of sectoral inflation persistence, but have negligible relative variance. We show that simple factor...

We set up and estimate a structural unobserved components open economy model for the rate of unemployment and the real exchange rate in Sweden. This approach enables us to simultaneously determine changes in both cyclical and equilibrium rates. Our results show that the Natural Rate/NAIRU has...

In recent years, it has become increasingly common to estimate New Keynesian Phillips curves with a measure of firms' real marginal cost as the real driving variable. It has been argued that this measure is both theoretically and empirically superior to the traditional output gap. In this paper,...

The interest in empirical studies of monetary policy has increased in the last decade. The deregulation of financial markets and the increased use of explicit policy rules and targets have made monetary policy more transparent and interesting for economic analysis. This paper demonstrates how a...

I compare nominal GDP level targeting to flexible inflation targeting in a small New Keynesian model subject to the zero lower bound on nominal policy rates. First, I study the performance of optimal discretionary policies. I find that, for a standard calibration, inflation targeting under...

Much empirical evidence suggests that wage increases do not lead to inflation. This paper demonstrates that a 2-sector dynamic general equilibrium model calibrated to the U.S. economy is able to explain this evidence. We quantify the effect of an increased wage-markup on the inflation rate in...

This paper presents estimates of the effects of monetary policy shocks on the Swedish economy. A theoretical model of an open economy is used to identify a structural VAR model. The empirical results from the identified VAR model are compared with two less structural approaches for...

In this paper we study 2-state Markov switching VAR models of monthly unemployment and inflation for three countries: Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States. The primary purpose is to examine if periods of low inflation are associated with high or low unemployment volatility. We find that...