The belief that the ECB follows the US Federal Reserve in setting its policy is so entrenched with market participants and commentators that the search for empirical support would seem to be a trivial task. However, this is not the case. We find that the ECB is indeed often influenced by the...

In this paper we propose an alternative explanation for the nature, sources and consequences of inflation rate differentials in a monetary union, such as EMU. To achieve this, we build on the new neoclassical synthesis (NNS) framework, recently advanced by Goodfriend (2002) and Goodfriend and...