Based on the significance of a Minimum Variance Portfolio (MVP) for the understanding of dollarization equilibria, a significant strand of the debate concerned with the driving forces behind this phenomenon has focused on analyzing the determinants of the relative volatility of inflation...

Central banks do not operate in a vacuum. In this paper we analyse the fac-tors leading to external pressure or public support for European monetary policy. Moreover, based upon the findings for the Deutsche Bundesbank, some additional les-sons are drawn for the ECB. External pressure on the ECB...

Territorial appointees to an independent central bank (e.g. District Federal Reserve Banks’ presidents, Governors of national central banks at the ECB’s Governing Council) are liable to confront a “role conflict” stemming from a duality of loyalties and allegiances - to the home regional...

The monetary system in Estonia is based on the currency board arrangement with German Mark. The strong commitments and rule-based features of currency board imply that there is no active monetary policy in Estonia – all necessarily monetary djustments are left to the market forces. Under fixed...

This paper examines the optimal frequency of monetary policy meetings when their schedule is pre-announced. Our contribution is twofold. First, we show that in the standard New Keynesian framework infrequent but periodic revision of monetary policy may be desirable even when there are no...

This paper quantifies transparency of monetary policy in the three EU New Member States that have adopted direct inflation targeting strategy. Two measures of transparency are applied. The institutional measure reflects the extent to which a central bank discloses information that is related to...

This paper investigates the empirical relevance of a new framework for monetary policy analysis in which the decision makers are allowed to weight differently positive and negative deviations of inflation and output from the target values. Reduced-form and structural estimates of the central...

This paper studies the transmission of common monetary shocks across European countries by using a dynamic factor model (Forni-Reichlin (1998)). This technique allows to extract the common European monetary shock and to compute country-specific responses. Our identification employs rotations of...

This paper proposes a simple framework for analyzing a continuum of monetary policy rules characterized by differing degrees of credibility, in which commitment and discretion become special cases of what we call quasi commitment. The monetary policy authority is assumed to formulate optimal...