The inflation measure used by the European Central Bank excludes housing costs that are borne by home owners even though they make up more than a tenth of household final consumption expenditure in the euro area. Has the exclusion of owner-occupied housing costs driven a wedge between the...

Central banks have responded with exceptional vigour to the crisis by using their traditional interest-rate tools to their limits and deploying a wide range of unconventional measures. This paper documents these responses in a systematic way, reviews the evidence about their impact, and...

In recent years, inflation in the euro area has failed to decelerate decisively while cyclical slack built up in the economy. Is this phenomenon more than a peculiarity in recent data? Is it related to structural policy settings? Econometric analysis conducted on two decades of quarterly data...

This paper considers a number of different measures of core inflation and tries to identify those containing the most useful information about future movements in headline inflation rates over the horizons relevant for monetary policy for the United States, the euro area, Japan, the United...

In January 2009, the Slovak Republic will adopt the euro and become the 16th member of the euro area. This paper investigates the implications of euro adoption in the Slovak Republic for inflation and interest rates with an attempt to quantify their likely size as well as their consequences for...