We identify an inflationary technology news shock as the leading source of business cycle variations for the postwar U.S. economy. This shock acts like a demand shock: it induces strong positive comovement in real quantities - GDP, consumption, investment - and weak positive comovement between...

"Leaning against the wind" - a tighter monetary policy than necessary for stabilizing inflation around the inflation target and unemployment around a long-run sustainable rate - has been justified as a way of reducing household indebtedness. In a recent paper Lars Svensson claims that this...

The Swedish economy is strongly dependent on global economic developments, which is re ected in generally strong empirical relationships between Swedish and foreign macroeconomic variables. It is, however, diffi cult for standard open-economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models...

In this paper I study the effects of monetary policy on economic activity and asset prices in Sweden, separately identifying the effects of a conventional policy change from effects of new information about economic fundamentals. Recent research has shown that high-frequency changes in policy...

This paper estimates the interaction between monetary- and fiscal policy using a structural VAR model with time-varying parameters. For demand and supply shocks, the two policies are estimated to be complementary, while for monetary and fiscal policies shocks the two policies act as substitutes....

Yes, it makes a lot of sense. This paper studies how to design simple loss functions for central banks, as parsimonious approximations to social welfare. We show, both analytically and quantitatively, that simple loss functions should feature a high weight on measures of economic activity,...

We assess the impact of large-scale asset purchases, commonly known as quantitative easing (QE), conducted by Sveriges Riksbank and the European Central Bank (ECB) on bond risk premia in the Swedish government bond market. Using a novel arbitrage-free dynamic term structure model of nominal and...

This paper presents estimates of the effects of monetary policy shocks on the Swedish economy. A theoretical model of an open economy is used to identify a structural VAR model. The empirical results from the identified VAR model are compared with two less structural approaches for...

The interest in empirical studies of monetary policy has increased in the last decade. The deregulation of financial markets and the increased use of explicit policy rules and targets have made monetary policy more transparent and interesting for economic analysis. This paper demonstrates how a...

In this paper we study 2-state Markov switching VAR models of monthly unemployment and inflation for three countries: Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States. The primary purpose is to examine if periods of low inflation are associated with high or low unemployment volatility. We find that...