We argue that Ireland experienced a great depression in the 1980s comparable in severity to the better known and more studied depression episodes of the interwar period. Using the business cycle accounting framework of Chari, Kehoe and McGrattan (2005), we examine the factors that lead to the...

In discussions of the likely implications for Europe of EMU, the United States is often cited as an example of a monetary union, while the United States' central bank, the Federal Reserve System, is cited as a model for how a central bank would function in a monetary union. While the costs and...

The Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) is the primary measure of inflation in the euro area, and plays a central role in the policy deliberations of the European Central Bank (ECB). The ECB defines its Treaty mandate of price stability as "…a year-on-year increase in the Harmonised...

We document the response of the individual components of the Producer Price Index (PPI) to commonly used measures of monetary shocks, and show that these responses are at variance with many widely-used “macro” models of monetary non-neutrality. Monetary shocks are shown to have large...