The European Central Bank has assigned a special role to money in its two pillar strategy and has received much criticism for this decision. In this paper, we explore possible justifications. The case against including money in the central bank's interest rate rule is based on a standard model...

Papers estimating the reaction function of the Bundesbank generally find that its monetary policy from the 1970s to 1998 can well be captured by a standard Taylor rule according to which the central bank responds to the output gap and to deviations of inflation from target, but not to monetary...

Trimmed-mean Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) inflation does not clearly dominate ex-food-and-energy PCE inflation in real-time forecasting of headline PCE inflation. However, trimmed-mean inflation is the superior communications and policy tool because it is a less-biased real-time...

We start from the assertion that a useful monetary policy design should be founded on more realistic assumptions about what policymakers can know at the time when policy decisions have to be made. Since the Taylor rule – if used as an operational device - implies a forward looking behaviour,...

The present paper uses survey data on expected consumer price developments to analyse the role of inflation expectations in the inflation process. The survey measures of price expectations are derived from the European Commission's Consumer Survey and from the surveys of professional experts...

National accounts data are always revised. Not only recent data, but also figures dating many years back can be revised substantially. This means that there is a danger that an important part of the central bank's information set is flawed for a long period of time. In this paper we present a...