Financial market crises with the threat of a subsequent debt-deflation depression have occurred with increasing regularity in the United States from 1980 through the present. Almost reflexively, when confronted with such circumstances, US institutions and the policymakers that run them have...

This study investigates the evolution of central bank profits as fiscal revenue (or: seigniorage) before and in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008-9, focusing on a select group of central banks - namely the Bank of England, the United States Federal Reserve System, the Bank of...

This note proposes an update to Figure 1 in "Macroeconomic Shocks and their Propagation" in the Handbook of Macroeconomics of 2016 (Ramey, 2016). Figure 1 of Ramey (2016) reports Impulse-Response Functions (IRFs) of variables of interest to a shock in the Federal Funds Rate, following the...

This paper investigates the European Central Bank's (ECB) monetary policies. It identifies an antigrowth bias in the bank's monetary policy approach: the ECB is quick to hike, but slow to ease. Similarly, while other players and institutional deficiencies share responsibility for the euro's...

We investigate a monetary regime with persistent, near-zero policy interest rates ("permazero" in the terminology of Bullard 2015). This regime was implemented in 1683 by a prominent early central bank called the Bank of Amsterdam ("Bank"). The Bank fixed its policy rate at one-half percent and...

We estimate the response of euro area sovereign bond yields to purchase operations under the ECB's Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP), using granular data on all PSPP-eligible securities at daily frequency. To avoid simultaneity bias in the estimated relationship between yields and purchase...

One of the main contributions of Modern Money Theory (MMT) has been to explain why monetarily sovereign governments have a very flexible policy space that is unconstrained by hard financial limits. Not only can they issue their own currency to pay public debt denominated in their own currency,...

This paper investigates the role of the European Central Bank (ECB) in the (mal-) functioning of Europe's Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), focusing on the German intellectual and historical traditions behind the euro policy regime and its central bank guardian. The analysis contrasts Keynes's...

We examine how the interaction between monetary policy and macroeconomic conditions affects inflation uncertainty in the long-term. The unobservable inflation uncertainty is quantified by means of the slowly evolving long-term variance component of inflation in the framework of the...

In this study, we examine how the interaction between monetary policy and macroeconomic conditions affects inflation uncertainty in the long-term. The unobservable inflation uncertainty is quantified by means of the slowly evolving unconditional variance component of inflation in the framework...