This paper examines whether monetary authorities should aim for low inflation or price stability. It first outlines and assesses many of the costs of inflation. Some of these, such as the distortionary effect upon the tax system, have been shown to involve significant welfare costs, even at very...

The purpose of this article is to describe how inflation analysis and forecasting has been carried out in the Bank, with particular emphasis on recent research and the new challenges facing the Bank following the launch of the euro on 1 January 1999. Broadly speaking the approach adopted by the...

In this paper we focus on the development of multiple time series models for forecasting Irish Inflation. The Bayesian approach to the estimation of vector autoregressive (VAR) models is employed. This allows the estimated models combine the evidence in the data with any prior information which...

This paper provides an empirical assessment of the important linkages which may exist between the housing sector and several key macroeconomic variables. The analysis focuses on (i) the effects of rising real incomes on house prices, (ii) the impact of monetary policy, i.e. interest rates, on...

This paper addresses the unresolved issues surrounding the determination of Irish inflation. The study tests the validity of i) a pure wage mark-up model ii) a pure small open economy model and iii) a hybrid model which fuses elements of i) and ii) over the period 1979:Q1-1995:Q3. Multivariate...

This paper considers the potential effects of asymmetric adjustment costs on the dynamics of housing supply. The model in Section 2 provides explicit microfoundations for the divergence between long and short run supply elasticities and also predicts asymmetric adjustment whereby positive...

This study assesses the extent to which exchange rate changes affect Irish import prices (i.e. the extent of exchange rate pass-through, PT) by analysing data from the 1963 to 1995 period. The paper fills two important gaps in the literature: i) by making due allowance for the time series...

This paper outlines the practical steps which need to be undertaken to use autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) time series models for forecasting Irish inflation. A framework for ARIMA forecasting is drawn up. It considers two alternative approaches to the issue of identifying ARIMA...

This paper attempts to shed further light on the primary determinants of Irish inflation. By way of introduction, the paper provides a critical assessment of the Irish literature to date within the context of several key international theories. Several areas of controversy surface from this...

Capacity Utilisation (CU) measures play an important role in practical economic analysis. Variation in the extent to which existing capacity is being utilised provides an indication of how the supply side of a particular industry, sector or economy is evolving relative to its demand side. Such...