In many countries, wage changes tend to be clustered in the beginning of the year, with wages being set for fixed durations of typically one year. This has been, in particular, documented in recent years for European countries using microeconomic data. Motivated by this evidence we build a model...

In the past decade or so, a number of central banks have purchased assets financed by the creation of central bank reserves as a tool for loosening monetary policy – a policy often known as ‘quantitative easing' or ‘QE'. The first half of the paper reviews the international evidence on the...

This paper revisits the paradox of flexibility, i.e., the result that, in a liquidity trap, greater price flexibility amplifies output volatility in response to negative demand shocks. We argue this paradox is the consequence of a failure of standard models to correctly characterize monetary...

This paper develops a model featuring both a macroeconomic and a financial friction that speaks to the interaction between monetary and macroprudential policy and to the role of US monetary and regulatory policy in the run up to the Great Recession. There are two main results. First, real...

We examine whether emerging market prudential policies offset the macro-financial spillover effects of US monetary policy. We find that emerging markets with tighter overall prudential policy face significantly smaller, and less negative, spillovers to total credit from US monetary policy...

This paper uses kernel methods to estimate a seven variable time-varying (TV) vector autoregressive (VAR) model on the US data set constructed by Smets and Wouters. We use an indirect inference method to map from this TV VAR to time variation in implied Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium...

We show that interest rate rules that feed back on the growth rates of target variables (such as output or asset prices) may induce recessions in the presence of a zero lower bound, through purely self-fulfilling dynamics. This pathology is illustrated in a small New Keynesian model with...

Long-term asset purchases carried out by central banks increase the consumption volatility of households holding long-term debt. For this reason, monetary authorities should not just aim at stabilising inflation and the output gap but also mitigate the volatility of their balance sheet. In...

The existence of and uncertainty about structural change in the economy are important features facing policymakers. This paper considers the implications for policy design of uncertainty about structural change, modelling the time variation in parameters of forward-looking models as Markov...

When the economy is in a liquidity trap and households have a precautionary motive to save against unemployment risk, adverse demand shocks cause severe deflationary spirals and output contractions. In this context, we study the implications of optimal monetary policy, which consists of keeping...