This study is an introduction to and summary of the 2002 Annual Meeting papers of the Royal Netherlands Economic Association. The general theme of this year's Annual Meeting is 'The role of wealth in the economy'. It is covered by 5 papers, which address the following topics: (i) household...

This paper examines the response of the economies of 11 EU countries, Japan, and the United States to shocks in housing and equity prices. The effects are assessed with a Structural Vector Auto Regressive (SVAR) model, and four key findings emerge. First, the impacts of asset price shocks are...

Recently, it has often been argued that globalization eases the job of central banks as it helps to tame inflation. This is used to argue that central banks (particularly the ECB, referring to the objectives as laid down in the EU-Treaty) could or should reduce their efforts in the fight against...

This paper examines which economic, fiscal, external, financial, and institutional characteristics of countries affect the likelihood that they adopt inflation targeting as their monetary policy strategy. We estimate a panel binary response transition model for 60 countries and two subsamples...

We study inflation targeting under uncertainty. Although uncertainty in the values of structural parameters makes the policy maker naturally more cautious, it does not immediately lead to the optimal monetary policy rule. We examine thus whether there exists a policy rule that improves welfare...

What are the implications of targeting different measures of inflation? We extend a basic theoretical framework of optimal monetary policy under inflation targeting to include several components of CPI inflation, and analyze the implications of using different measures of inflation as target...

This paper develops a methodology, based on Furfine (1999), to identify unsecured interbank money market loans from transaction data of the most important euro processing payment system, TARGET2, for maturity ranging from one day (overnight) up to three months. The implementation has been...

This paper investigates how changes in the monetary policy framework have affected the overnight money market lending rate for the Dutch segment of the euro area during tranquil and crisis times. We present an EGARCH model on the volatility of the overnight lending rate. The results show that...

This paper surveys the literature on monetary policy at the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates. Certain crucial insights regarding expectations have been neglected in recent research in this field. Taking this into account, the interactions between demand and supply shocks appear crucial...

We study whether clarity of central bank inflation reports affects return volatility in financial markets. We measure clarity of reports by the Czech National Bank, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, and Sveriges Riksbank using the Flesch-Kincaid grade level, a standard readability...