Does society benefit from the delegation of monetary policy to cautious and conservative central bankers? We offer a critical view on the delegation literature and relax seemingly innocuous assumptions about uncertainty and preferences. First, caution improves credibility but does not obviate...

This paper presents stylised facts about the business cycle of the euro area. The results suggest that the stylised facts for the euro area economy and the US are very similar. The magnitude of the fluctuations in consumption, investment, prices, inflation, interest rate, monetary aggregates...

This paper investigates the effects of monetary policy on firms' investment behaviour. The analysis relies on a comprehensive database of Belgian firms covering all sectors of economic activity and firms of all sizes. We proceed in two steps. First, we estimate a reduced-form investment equation...

This paper studies the effects of monetary policy on the investment behaviour of various categories of Italian firms, using a panel from the Company Accounts Data Service (Centrale dei Bilanci). The exercise aims to shed light on the quantitative importance of a channel of transmission operating...

We present a comparable set of results on the monetary transmission channels on firm investment for the four largest countries of the euro area (Germany, France, Italy and Spain). With particularly rich micro datasets for each country containing over 215,000 observations from 1985 to 1999, we...

This paper examines how price setting plays a key role in explaining the steady-state effects of inflation in a monopolistic competition economy. Three pricing variants (optimal prices, indexed prices, and unchanged prices) are introduced through a generalization of the Calvo-type setting that...

The paper analyses the trade-off between exchange rate flexibility and monetary policy autonomy. It tests empirically the 'Possible Duality' hypothesis, i.e. whether countries with more flexible currency regimes are indeed able to exert more monetary policy autonomy than those with less flexible...

We study bidder bahavior and performance in 53 main refinancing operations (repo auctions) of the European Central Bank (ECB). The data set starts with the first auctions after the ECB changed from fixed rate tenders to variable rate tenders. We find that private information and the winnner's...

This paper derives a general framework for collateral risk control determination in repurchase transactions or repos. The objective is to treat consistently heterogeneous collateral so that the collateral taker has a similar risk exposure whatever the collateral pledged. The framework measures...