During the Great Crisis, most governments in industrial countries supported their domestic financial sector under stress and responded to strong declines in output growth with fiscal stimulus packages. Starting in 2010, attention focused on the sustainability of the resulting debt burdens. We...

We empirically test whether there is a causal link between the real interest rate and the natural rate of interest, which could be a harbinger of secular stagnation if the real rate declines. Outcomes of VAR models for Japan, Germany and the US show that a fall in the real rate indeed affects...

I build a small open economy version of the Calvo-type staggered price-setting model with limited asset market participation, and I show that the inverted aggregate demand logic is less likely to apply to small open economies. The equilibrium dynamics of the model are reduced to a representation...

Inequality has been largely ignored in the literature and practice of monetary policy, but is gaining more attention recently. We look at how a decade of unconventional monetary policy (UMP) in Japan affected inequality among households using survey data. Our vector auto regression (VAR) results...

We study whether the sensitivity of Swedish interest rates to economic news was affected by the zero lower bound and the Riksbank.s monetary policies. Our results suggest that the sensitivity of interest rate swaps to Swedish macroeconomic news was reduced at the effective zero lower bound at...

This paper studies ECB and Bundesbank communication on monetary policyduring the first years of the European Economic and Monetary Union. We study whether statements by different (groups of) central bankers have been contradictory and whether differences have diminished over time. We find that...

This paper examines robust estimators of core inflation for Belgian historical CPI data, and for euro area Harmonised Indices of Consumer Prices. Evidence of fat tails in the cross-sections of price changes is provided by traditional measures, as well as by a robust measure of the tail weights...

We identify credible monetary policy with first, a disconnect between inflation and inflation expectations and second, the anchoring of the latter at the inflation target announced by the monetary authorities. We test empirically whether this is the case for a number of countries that have an...

Anchored inflation expectations help stabilize inflation. Previous results indicate that monetary policy has been effective in breaking the link between actual and expected inflation at the euro area level. In this paper we examine whether this is also true at the national level. We define the...

We investigate whether the anchoring properties of long-run inflation expectations in the United States, the euro area and the United Kingdom have changed around the economic crisis that erupted in mid-2007. We document that in these three economies, expectations measures extracted from...