In this paper I focus on two specific hazard areas in the transition from Stage Two to Stage Three of European economic and monetary union (EMU), as well as on some key problems of Stage Three that EMU's monetary and fiscal structures appear ill-prepared to handle. The transitional hazards are...

We identify monetary policy shocks by exploiting variation in the central bank's information set. To be specific, we use differences between nowcasts of the output gap and inflation with final, revised estimates of these series to isolate movements in the policy rate unrelated to economic...

The US Federal Reserve cut interest rates more vigorously in the recent recession than the European Central Bank did. By comparison with the Fed, the ECB followed a more measured course of action. We use an estimated dynamic general equilibrium model with financial frictions to show that...

In this paper we examine how target ranges work in the context of a Barro-Gordon (1983) type model, in which the time-inconsistency problem stems from political pressures from the government. We show that target ranges turn out to be an excellent way to cope with the time-inconsistency problem,...

Structural DSGE models are used for analyzing both policy and the sources of business cycles. Conclusions based on full structural models are, however, potentially affected by misspecification. A competing method is to use partially identified SVARs based on narrative shocks. This paper asks...

Existing high-frequency monetary policy shocks explain surprisingly little variation in stock prices and exchange rates around FOMC announcements. Further, both of these asset classes display heightened volatility relative to non-announcement times. We use a heteroskedasticity-based procedure to...

We examine the sources of macroeconomic fluctuations by estimating a variety of richly parameterized DSGE models within a unified framework that incorpo- rates regime switching both in shock variances and in the inflation target. We propose an efficient methodology for estimating...

We develop a novel method for the identification of monetary policy shocks. By applying natural language processing techniques to documents that Federal Reserve staff prepare in advance of policy decisions, we capture the Fed's information set. Using machine learning techniques, we then predict...

We develop a structural vector autoregressive framework that combines external instruments and heteroskedasticity for identification of monetary policy shocks. We show that exploiting both types of information sharpens structural inference, allows testing the relevance and exogeneity condition...

In a rich family of linearized structural macroeconomic models, the counterfactual evolution of the macro-economy under alternative policy rules is pinned down by just two objects: first, reduced-form projections with respect to a large information set; and second, the dynamic causal effects of...