Since the breakdown of the Bretton Woods System diverging current account positions in Europe have prevailed. While the Southern and Western European countries have tended to run current account deficits, the current accounts of the Central and Northern European countries, in particular Germany,...

This paper explores the potential effectiveness of the ECB s Outright Monetary Transaction (OMT) program in safeguarding an appropriate monetary policy transmission. Since the program aims at manipulating bank lending rates by conducting sovereign bond purchases on secondary markets, a stable...

This paper uses panel vector autoregressive models and simulations of an estimated DSGE model to explore the reaction of Euro area banks to the global financial crisis. We focus on their interest rate setting behavior in response to standard macroeconomic shocks. Our main empirical finding is...

How much have the dynamics of US time series and in the particular the transmission of innovations to monetary policy instruments changed over the last century? The answers to these questions that this paper gives are "A lot." and "Probably less than you think.", respectively. We use vector...

Abstract. Deviations of policy interest rates from the levels implied by the Taylor rule have been persistent after the turn of the century even before the financial crisis. These deviations could be due to lower real interest rates, as stated by the savings glut hypothesis as well as the...

The Taylor rule is a widely used concept in monetary macroeconomics and has been used in various areas either for positive or normative analyses. We examine whether the robustifying nature of Taylor rule cross-checking in the spirit of R island and Sveen (2011) also carries over to the case of...

Using monthly post-1995 Japanese data we propose a new sign-restriction based approach to identify monetary policy shocks when the economy is at the zero-lower bound (ZLB). The identifying restrictions are thoroughly grounded in liquidity trap theory. Our results show that a quantitative easing...

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand guides interest rate expectations of financial markets by projections of future short-term rates that are updated only once a quarter. As a consequence, projections become stale when time evolves and new information enters the market. This paper investigates the...

In this paper, we analyse the effects of objective and subjective knowledge about monetary policy, as well as the information search patterns, of German citizens on trust in the ECB. We rely on a unique representative public opinion survey of German households conducted in 2011. We find that...

In this paper we present a simple framework to model central bank forward guidance in a liquidity trap. We analyze the role of long-run and short-run price stickiness under discretion and commitment in a straightforward and intuitive way. Despite the impact of price rigidity on welfare being...