There is a broad consensus that the quality of the political system and its institutionsare fundamental for a country’s prosperity. The paper focuses on political events inItaly over the past 35 years and asks whether the adoption of the euro in 1999 hashelped insulate Italy’s financial...

How do financial markets price new information? This paper analyzes price setting atthe intersection of private and public information, by testing whether and how thereaction of financial markets to public signals depends on the relative importance ofprivate information in agents’ information...

Monetary Policy Committees differ in the way the interest rate proposal is preparedand presented in the policy meeting. In this paper we show analytically how differentarrangements could affect the voting behaviour of individual MPC members andtherefore policy outcomes. We then apply our results...

Existing work on wage bargaining (as exemplified by Cukierman and Lippi, 2001) typicallypredicts more aggressive wage setting under monetary union. This insight has not beenconfirmed by the EMU experience, which has been characterised by wage moderation,thereby eliciting criticism from Posen and...

Using the Consensus Economics dataset with individual expertforecasts from G7 countries we investigate determinants of disagreement (crosssectionaldispersion of forecasts) about six key economic indicators. Disagreementabout real variables (GDP, consumption, investment and unemployment)has a...

We study how the structure of housing finance affects the transmission of monetarypolicy shocks. We document three main facts: first, the features of residentialmortgage markets differ markedly across industrialized countries; second, and accordingto a wide range of indicators, the transmission...

Liquidity provision through its repo auctions has been one of the main instrumentsof the European Central Bank (ECB) to address the recent tensions infinancial markets since summer 2007. In this paper, we analyse banks’ biddingbehaviour in the ECB’s main refinancing operations (MROs) during...

This paper examines the impact of downward wage rigidity (nominal and real) onoptimal steady-state inflation. For this purpose, we extend the workhorse model ofErceg, Henderson and Levin (2000) by introducing asymmetric menu costs for wagesetting. We estimate the key parameters by simulated...

We consider a simple extension of the basic new-Keynesian setup in which we relaxthe assumption of frictionless financial markets. In our economy, asymmetricinformation and default risk lead banks to optimally charge a lending rate above therisk-free rate. Our contribution is threefold. First,...