This paper addresses two important questions that have, so far, been studied separately in the literature. First, the paper aims at explaining the high volatility of long-term interest rates observed in the data, which is hard to replicate using standard macro models. Building a small-scale...

In this paper, we study identification and misspecification problems in standard closed and open-economy empirical New-Keynesian DSGE models used in monetary policy analysis. We find that problems with model misspecification still appear to be a first-order issue in monetary DSGE models, and...

In assessing Alexander Swoboda's great influence on economics, two themes stand out: the determinants of global inflation, particularly in the 1970s, and the choice of an exchange rate regime consistent with domestic monetary and fiscal policies. Although seemingly narrowly focused on China, our...

The paper analyses the monetary policy operations of central banks in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). We distinguish the pattern of monetary policy operations of the liquidity providing central banks of the large industrialized countries (creditor central banks) and the liquidity...

Monetary policy in CEE is an important determinant in the wage bargaining process, because trade unions have to predict inflation as one component of future real wages. This paper scrutinizes whether countries in CEE that officially announce an inflation target are tempted to act...

A common finding in the international-economics literature is that the elasticity of substitution between domestically produced and imported goods is smaller in the short than in the long run. Despite this, most of today's commonly used macroeconomic models assume this elasticity to be constant....

Given low interest rates in the large industrial countries and buoyant capital inflows into the emerging markets East Asian central banks have accumulated large stocks of foreign reserves. As the resulting easing of monetary conditions has become a threat to domestic price and financial...

We develop a structural model of a small open economy with gradual exchange rate pass-through and endogenous inertia in inflation and output. We then estimate the model by matching the implied impulse responses with those obtained from a VAR model estimated on Swedish data. Although our model is...

The pass-through from exchange rate changes to inflation differs depending on the underlying shock. This paper quantifies the conditional exchange rate pass-through (CERPT) to prices, i.e. the change in prices relative to that in the exchange rate following a certain exogenous shock, with a...

We study the fluctuations of exchange rates and consumer prices in two small open economies, Sweden and Canada, using a structural Bayesian VAR. Four domestic and two global shocks are identified through zero and sign restrictions. For both economies, we find that the main driver of consumer...