The EMU accession countries are obliged to fulfill the Maastrich convergence criteria prior to entering the EMU. This paper uses a DSGE model of a two-sector small open economy, to address the following question: How do the Maastricht convergence criteria modify optimal monetary policy in an...

We use a version of the New Area-Wide Model (NAWM) developed at the ECB in order to quantify the gains from monetary policy cooperation. The model is calibrated in order to match a set of empirical moments. We then derive the cooperative and (open-loop) Nash monetary policies, assuming that the...

This paper compares two contrasting approaches to robust monetary policy design. The first developed by Hansen and Sargent (2003, 2007) assumes unstructured model uncertainty and uses a minimax robustness criterion to design monetary rules. This contrasts with an older literature that structures...

Short-term fiscal indicators based on public accounts data are often used by European policy makers. They represent one of the main sources of publicly available intra-annual fiscal information. Nevertheless, these indicators have received limited attention from the academic literature analysing...

In this paper, we examine the macroeconomic effects of alternative fiscal consolidation policies in the New Area-Wide Model (NAWM), a two-country open-economy model of the euro area developed at the European Central Bank (cf. Coenen et al., 2007). We model fiscal consolidation as a permanent...

Economic policy makers, international organisations and private-sector forecasters commonly use short-term forecasts of real GDP growth based on monthly indicators, such as industrial production, retail sales and confidence surveys. An assessment of the reliability of such tools and of the...