Do the prevailing unusually and persistently low real interest rates reflect a decline in the natural rate of interest as commonly thought? We argue that this is only part of the story. The critical role of financial factors in influencing medium-term economic fluctuations must also be taken...

Prevailing explanations of the decline in real interest rates since the early 1980s are premised on the notion that real interest rates are driven by variations in desired saving and investment. But based on data stretching back to 1870 for 19 countries, our systematic analysis casts doubt on...

Over 2010-2016, municipal debt in Germany crowded out private investment worth 1 percent of GDP. Forced to lend to municipalities by their statutes, local public banks compensated for declining municipal-debt yields by charging higher rates to firms in Germany's locally segmented credit markets....

This paper revisits the case for flexible vs. fixed exchange rate regime in a two-country model with firm heterogeneity and nominal wage rigidity under incomplete financial markets. Dampening nominal exchange rate fluctuations simultaneously stabilizes the firm turnover in the export market....

In response to the Great Financial Crisis, the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England have adopted unconventional monetary policy instruments. We investigate if one of these, purchases of long-term government debt, could be a valuable addition to conventional short- term interest rate policy...

How long is the long run in the relationship between money growth and inflation? How important are high inflation episodes for the unit slope finding in the quantity theory of money? To answer these questions we study the relationship between excess money growth and inflation over time and...

This paper studies monetary policy strategies under endogenous technology dynamics and low r ∗ . Endogenous growth strengthens the gains from make-up strategies relative to inflation targeting, especially if policy space is reduced. This result is due to the long-run non-neutrality of money...

In this paper we present Aino 3.0, the latest vintage of the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model used at the Bank of Finland for policy analysis. Aino 3.0 is a small-open economy DSGE model at the intersection of the recent literatures on so-called TANK ('Two-Agent New...

We estimate a three-variate VAR using proxies of global financial uncertainty, the global financial cycle, and world industrial production to simulate the effects of the jump in financial uncertainty observed in correspondence of the Covid-19 outbreak. We predict the cumulative loss in world...

Communication targeting households and firms has become a stand-alone policy tool of many central banks. But which forms of communication, if any, can reach ordinary people and manage their economic expectations effectively? In a large-scale randomized control trial, we show that communication...