Yes, they would. In a randomized control trial, we provide groups of respondents from the Bundesbank Online Panel Households with information about a hypothetical alternative ECB monetary policy regime akin to the Federal Reserve’s flexible average inflation targeting (AIT). Inflation...

We study how households adjust their medium-term inflation expectations under the new ECB strategy. We find that survey respondents make little difference between the previous strategy of targeting inflation rates close to but below 2% and the new strategy with a symmetric 2% target. Yet,...

This paper questions unconventional fiscal policy effects when the monetary policy rate is at the zero lower bound. We provide evidence for the US that the spread between the policy rate and the US-LIBOR, which is more relevant for private sector transactions, increases with government...

This paper takes up the issue of the flexibility of inflation targeting regimes, with the specific goal of determining whether the monetary policy of the Bank of England, which has a formal inflation target, has been any less flexible than that of the Federal Reserve, which does not have such a...

This paper proposes a tractable financial accelerator New Keynesian DSGE modelthat allows for closed-form solutions. In the presence of financial frictions, theNew Keynesian Phillips curve features a flat slope with respect to the output gapand is strongly forward-looking. All shocks cause...

Since the financial crisis, central banks have stressed the role of trust and communication in connection with their objectives and strategies for aligning the public's inflation expectations with their own and, consequently, improving the effectiveness of monetary policy. Assessing how much the...

We consider a model with frictional unemployment and staggered wage bargaining where hours worked are negotiated every period. The workers' bargaining power in the hours negotiation affects both unemployment volatility and inflation persistence. The closer to zero this parameter, (i) the more...

In models with complete markets, targeting core inflation enables monetary policy to maximize welfare by replicating the flexible price equilibrium. In this paper, we develop a twosector two-good closed economy new Keynesian model to study the optimal choice of price index in markets with...

This paper analyzes the cost of disinflations under real wage rigidities in a micro-founded New Keynesian model. The consensus is that real wage rigidities can be a useful mechanism to induce the inflation persistence that is absent in the standard Calvo model. Real wage rigidities thus generate...

This paper provides a model that can account for the almost uniform staggering of wage contracts in some countries as well as for the markedly nonuniform staggering in others. In the model, short and long contracts as well as long contracts concluded in different periods are strategic...