Twice a year FOMC members submit forecasts for growth, unemplyoment and in ation to be published in the Humphrey-Hawkins Report to Congress. In this paper we use individual FOMC forecasts to assess whether these forecasts exhibit herding behavior, a pattern often found in private sector...

We revisit the sources of the bias in Federal Reserve forecasts and assess whether a precautionary motive can explain the forecast bias. In contrast to the existing literature, we use forecasts submitted by individual FOMC members to uncover members' implicit loss function. Our key finding is...

The wage curve introduced by Blanchflower and Oswald (1990, 1994) postulates a negative correlation between wages and unemployment. Empirical results focus on particular theoretical channels establishing the relationship. Panel models mostly draw on unionized bargaining or the efficiency wage...

The relevance of spatial effects in the wage curve can be rationalized by the model of monopsonistic competition in regional labour markets. However, distortions in extracting the regional unemployment effects arise in standard regional (i.e. NUTS) classifications as they fail to adequately...

In this paper, we explore the interest rate setting behavior of newly appointed central bank governors. We use the Kuttner and Posen (2010) sample, which covers 15 OECD countries, and estimate an augmented Taylor (1993) rule for the period 1974-2008. We find, first, that newly appointed...

This paper investigates how inflation expectations evolve. In particular, we analyze the time-varying nature of the propensity to update expectations and its potential determinants. For this purpose we set up a flexible econometric model that tracks the formation of inflation expectations of...

In this paper, we test whether public preferences for price stability (obtained from the Eurobarometer survey) are actually reflected in the interest rates set by eight central banks. We estimate augmented Taylor (1993) rules for the period 1976-1993 using the dynamic GMM estimator. We find,...

We use MPC voting records to predict changes in the volume of asset purchases. We find, first, that minority voting favoring an increase in the volume of asset purchases raises the probability of an actual increase at the next meeting. Second, minority voting supporting a higher Bank Rate...

In this paper we systematically evaluate how central banks respond to inflation deviations from target. We present a stylized New Keynesian model in which agents' inflation expectations are sensitive to inflation deviations from target. To (re-)establish credibility, optimal monetary policy...

This paper examines the policy rate recommendations of the Bank of Canada's Governing Council (GC) and the C.D. Howe Institute's Monetary Policy Council (MPC) since 2003. We find, first, that differences in the median recommendations between the MPC and the GC are persistent but small (i.e., 25...