This paper proposes tests of policy ineffectiveness in the context of macroeconometric rational expectations models. It is assumed that there is a policy intervention that takes the form of changes in the parameters of a policy rule, and that there are sufficient observations before and after...

This paper seeks to understand the interplay between banks, bank regulation, sovereign default risk and central bank guarantees in a monetary union. I assume that banks can use sovereign bonds for repurchase agreements with a common central bank, and that their sovereign partially backs up any...

In this paper we present a three period setup to model central bank forward guidance in a liquidity trap. We analyze the role of long-run and short-run price stickiness under discretion and commitment in a straightforward and intuitive way. Despite the impact of price rigidity on welfare being...

Over the past 20 years, macroeconomists have incorporated more and more results from behavioral economics into their models. We argue that doing so has helped fixed deficiencies with standard approaches to modeling the economy-for example, the counterfactual absence of inertia in the standard...

Many central banks have become more transparent during the last decade, in particular about macroeconomic prospects. This paper shows that such economic transparency could give central banks greater flexibility to respond to macroeconomic shocks. In particular, it allows central banks to...

In a monetary union, the interaction between several governments and a single central bank is plagued by several sources of deficit bias, including common pool problems. Each government has strong preferences over local spending and taxation but suffers only part of the costs of union-wide...

To analyse the most important aspects of the Secular Stagnation hypothesis, this paper considers the effects of hysteresis in potential output in a New-Keynesian model that is extended with endogenous potential output. To do so, a number of simulations of relevant scenarios is undertaken. It is...

It is well-known that the high synchronization of the business cycles among industrial countries cannot easily be replicated in standard open economy macroeconomic models without assuming that the exogenous shocks hitting these countries are highly correlated. We develop a two-country behavioral...

It is an open question whether and how indexed wage contracts reduce welfare or raise average inflation. This paper analyzes the impact of indexed wage contracts on inflation and social welfare in a Barro Gordon model with discretionary monetary policy by endogenizing social costs of indexation....

In this paper we address the issue of how transmission uncertainty could affect the choice between a federal monetary policy based on national data and one on aggregated data.We find that the uncertainty about the transmission process increases the need to take into account information about...