This paper demonstrates how a target for money growth can be beneficial for an inflation targeting central bank acting under discretion. Because the growth rate of money is closely related to the change in the interest rate and he growth of real output, delegating a money growth target to the...

Using panel data of 68,800 small and large firms, I examine whether firms are subject to shifts in the supply of credit over the business cycle. Shifts in the supply of credit are identified by exploring how firms substitute between commitment credit - lines of credit - and non-commitment...

A standard, no-recourse mortgage contract does not adjust when the value of the underlying collateral falls. Consequently, shocks that lower house prices may trigger one of the necessary conditions for default: negative equity. A common alternative contract attempts to prevent default by...

We estimate private costs in the Swedish banking sector for the production of payment services and investigate to what extent the price structure reflects the estimated cost structure. We find that (i) banks tend to use two-part tariffs but (ii) variable costs are poorly reflected in transaction...

In this paper, I try to shed some new light on the "puzzle" why the Lucas critique, belived to be important by most economists, seems to have received very little empirical support. I use a real business cycle model to examine the properties of the super exogeneity test, which is used to detect...

We use an “unexplained demand for cash” approach to measure the size of the shadow economy in Sweden. The size of the shadow economy is found to have increased from 3.8 to 6.5 per cent of GDP from 1990 to 2004. This result is also supported by our finding of an increased residual between...

In this paper, I investigate quantitatively how sensitive a typical backward-looking model used in monetary plicy analysis is to the Lucas critique. To do this, I use an equilibrium business cycle model with a Taylor-type rule for nominal money growth. The backward-looking model displays...

We explore the implications of shocks to expected future productivity. In a setting with limited enforcement of financial contracts, firms have to post collateral to obtain external finance. In a real one-sector model with this type of "collateral constraint", positive news about future...

"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...

How do aggregate quantities at the business cycle frequency respond to shocks to the spread between residential mortgage rates and government bonds? Using a structural VAR approach, we find that mortgage spread shocks impact the real economy by both economically and statistically significant...