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...

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...

In a simple dynamic macroeconomic model, it is shown that uncertainty about structural parameters does not necessarily lead to more cautious monetary policy, refining the accepted wisdom concerning the effects of parameter uncertainty on optimal policy. In particular, when there is uncertainty...

This paper presents a theoretical model of the term structure of interest rates based on the monetary policy decision-making process at modern central banks. Evaluations of explicit expressions for the spot and forward rate curve render several important results: (i) Spot and forward rates are...

We use a quantitative model of the U.S. economy to analyze the response of long-term interest rates to monetary policy, and compare the model results with empirical evidence. We find that the strong and time-varying yield curve response to monetary policy innovations found in the data can be...

It has been suggested that interest-rate smoothing may be partly explained by an omitted variable that relates to conditions in financial markets. We propose an alternative interpretation that suggests that it relates to measurement errors in the output gap.

Asymmetric information between the central bank and bond markets creates an inference problem that affects the behaviour of long interest rates. This paper employs a simple macroeconomic model with a time-varying infation target to illustrate the implications of asymmetry for the sensitivity of...

Vector autoregressions have steadily gained in popularity since their introduction in econometrics 25 years ago. A drawback of the otherwise fairly well developed methodology is the inability to incorporate prior beliefs regarding the system's steady state in a satisfactory way. Such prior...

"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...