Successful descriptions of short-term nominal interest rates inertial behavior have frequently been obtained with small scale macro models in which a Central Banker minimizes a loss function embedding an argument labelled as interest rate smoothing. The rationale for this argument is not...

The design of monetary policy depends upon the targeting strategy adopted by the central bank. This strategy describes a set of policy preferences, which are actually the structural parameters to analyse monetary policy making. Accordingly, we develop a novel calibration method to identify...

Monetary policy in the US is characterized by a substantial degree of inertia. While in principle this may well be the outcome of an optimizing central bank behavior, the ability of any derived policy rule to match the data relies on so large weights for interest rate smoothing into policy...

We estimate a nonlinear VAR model to study the real effects of monetary policy shocks in regimes characterized by high vs. low macroeconomic uncertainty. We find unexpected monetary policy moves to exert a substantially milder impact in presence of high uncertainty. We then exploit the set of...

This paper studies the challenge that increasing the inflation target poses to equilibrium determinacy in a medium-sized New Keynesian model without indexation fitted to the Great Moderation era. For moderate targets of the inflation rate, such as 2 or 4 percent, the probability of determinacy...

This paper estimates a nonlinear Threshold-VAR to investigate if a Keynesian liquidity trap due to a speculative motive was in place in the U.S. Great Depression and the recent Great Recession. We find clear evidence in favor of a breakdown of the liquidity effect after an unexpected increase in...

We estimate a nonlinear VAR to quantify the impact of economic policy uncertainty shocks originating in the US on the Canadian unemployment rate in booms and busts. We find strong evidence in favor of asymmetric spillover effects. Unemployment in Canada is shown to react to uncertainty shocks in...