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...

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...

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...

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...

The substantial fluctuations in house prices recently experienced by many industrialized economies have stimulated a vivid debate on the possible implications for monetary policy. In this paper, we ask whether the U.S. Fed, the Bank of Japan and the Bank of England have reacted to house prices....

"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...

In September 1931, Sweden became the first country to make the stabilization of the domestic price level the official goal of its monetary policy, actually the only country that so far has adopted such an explicit price level target. Starting from the issues and concepts familiar from research...

The recent debate over monetary policy strategies concludes that monetary targeting and inflation targeting in practice lead to very similar patterns of central bank behavior. This raises the question why central banks insist on the strategies they use. In this paper, we develop an answer from...

This paper examines a price-level target in a model with a forward-looking Calvo-Taylor Phillips curve. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is found that price-level targeting leads to a better trade-off between inflation and output-gap variability than inflation targeting, when the central bank...