This paper empirically studies the impact of the quality of political institutions on the link between central bank independence and inflation. Making use of data on the evolution of central bank independence over time and controlling for possible nonlinearities, we employ interaction models to...

We estimate the causal impact of countercyclical interest rates on macroeconomic outcomes in open economies. To identify countercyclical interest rates, we construct a new database of short-term interest rates, principal exports, and international commodity prices for 40 economies from 1870 to...

This paper provides a general strategy for analyzing monetary policy in real time which accounts for data uncertainty without explicitly modelling the revision process. The strategy makes use of all the data available from a real-time data matrix and averages model estimates across all data...

Inflation expectations are a key determinant of actual and future inflation and thus matter for the conduct of monetary policy. We study how firms form their inflation expectations using quarterly firm-level data from the Bank of Canada's Business Outlook Survey, spanning the 2001 to 2015...

We construct a slope factor from changes in federal funds futures of different horizons. Slope predicts stock returns at the weekly frequency: faster monetary policy easing positively predicts excess returns. Investors can achieve increases in weekly Sharpe ratios of 20% conditioning on the...

This paper examines the Taylor rule in five emerging economies, namely Indonesia, Israel, South Korea, Thailand, and Turkey. In particular, it investigates whether monetary policy in these countries can be more accurately described by (i) an augmented rule including the exchange rate, as well as...

Using a new consumer survey dataset, we show that macroeconomic preferences affect expectations and economic decisions through different channels. While household expectations are on average inversely related to preferences, households with the same inflation or interest rate expectations can...

Does the South African rand's relatively large volatility affect inflation? To shed some light on this question, a standard estimation technique of exchange rate pass-through to inflation is extended to incorporate exchange rate volatility. Estimated results suggest that higher exchange rate...

We study negative interest rate policy (NIRP) exploiting ECB's NIRP introduction and administrativedata from Italy, severely hit by the Eurozone crisis. NIRP has expansionary effects on credit supply---and hence the real economy---through a portfolio rebalancing channel. NIRP affects banks...

Do euro area inflation expectations remain well-anchored? This paper finds that the protractedperiod of low (and below-target) inflation in the euro area since 2013 has weakened theiranchoring. Testing their sensitivity to inflation and macroeconomic news, this paper expandsexisting results in...