The 20th anniversary of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) offers an opportunity to look back on the ECB's record and learn lessons that can improve the conduct of policy in the future. This paper charts the way the ECB has defined, interpreted and applied its monetary policy framework - its...

We evaluate the Friedman-Schwartz hypothesis that a more accommodative monetary policy could have greatly reduced the severity of the Great Depression. To do this, we first estimate a dynamic, general equilibrium model using data from the 1920s and 1930s. Although the model includes eight...

We augment a standard monetary DSGE model to include a banking sector and financial markets. We fit the model to Euro Area and US data. We find that agency problems in financial contracts, liquidity constraints facing banks and shocks that alter the perception of market risk and hit financial...

This paper presents a toolkit1 for generating optimal policy projections. It makes five contributions. First, the toolkit requires a minimal set of inputs: only a baseline projection for target and instrument variables and impulse responses of those variables to policy shocks. Second, it solves...

We analyse the implications of asymmetric monetary policy rules by estimating Markovswitching DSGE models for the euro area (EA) and the US. The estimations show that until mid-2014 the ECB's response to in ation was more forceful when in ation was above 2% than below 2%. Since then, the ECB's...

We study alternative monetary policy strategies in the presence of the lower bound on nominal interest rates and a low equilibrium real rate using an estimated DSGE model for the euro area. We demonstrate that simple feedback rules that implement inflation targeting result in a binding lower...