This paper discusses the two-way interaction between policy and academic enquiry regarding rules for monetary policy. The emerging consensus on monetary policy is described; in that context, some of the features of the current UK system are outlined which seem particularly important. From a...

The paper exploits a simulation environment and its output indicators to compare the performance of "ex-ante" policy instruments across housing and social welfare domains. We create a progressive score to contrast six single and mixed policy instruments against a no-policy baseline. The multiple...

We describe a new mechanism - what we call a booster draft - for allocating multiple, indivisible objects among a group of individuals. The mechanism’s appeal lies in its strategy-proofness and simplicity: Individuals take turns drawing objects from different sets - called boosters - and...

Against the background of the recent housing boom and bust in countries such as Spain and Ireland, we investigate in this paper the macroeconomic consequences of cross-border banking in monetary unions such as the euro area. For this purpose, we incorporate in an otherwise standard two-region...

Survey data on inflation expectations show that: (i) private sector forecasts and central bank forecasts are not fully aligned and (ii) private sector forecasters disagree about inflation expectations. To reconcile these two facts we introduce dispersed information in a New Keynesian model,...

We analyze the positive and normative effects of a progressive tax on wages in a nonlinear New Keynesian DSGE model in the presence of demand and technology shocks. The non-linearity allows us to disentangle the effects of the progressive tax on the volatility and the level of macroeconomic...