This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at a conference on "Fiscal and Monetary Policy" held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on March 4 and 5, 2005.

The standardisation of the European systems of national accounts has progressed significantly in recent years. Some room for interpretation remains in regard to some accounting standards, the periodicity of the data, and the quality of the forecasts of budget deficits. Yet national accounts data...

Model uncertainty has the potential to change importantly how monetary policy should be conducted, making it an issue that central banks cannot ignore. In this paper, I use a standard new Keynesian business cycle model to analyze the behavior of a central bank that conducts policy with...

Robust control allows policymakers to formulate policies that guard against model misspecification. The principal tools used to solve robust control problems are state-space methods (see Hansen and Sargent 2006 and Giordani and Soderlind 2004). In this paper we show that the structural-form...

This paper presents empirical evidence on the behaviour of interbank lending in Germany after a monetary policy impulse. Our VAR analysis shows that following a monetary contraction, the banking system as a whole attracts additional funds from foreign banks. Whereas small cooperative and savings...

The question how best to communicate monetary policy decisions remains a highly topical issue among central banks. Focusing on the experience of the European Central Bank, this paper studies how explanations of monetary policy decisions at press conferences are perceived by financial markets....

Since uncertainty is such an important issue for policymakers it should come as no surprise that economists have made a study of its various guises and developed formal techniques to help understand and mitigate its effects. In this Letter I discuss, in broad-brush terms, some of these...

This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at a conference on "Monetary Policy, Transparency, and Credibility" held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on March 23 and 24, 2007.

This Economic Letter looks at time-inconsistency, describing why the same mechanisms that can lead to higher average inflation also can hamper policymakers' efforts to keep inflation stable.

In this Economic Letter, we summarize the key components of the GVAR model and discuss its usefulness for monetary policy applications and for credit risk management issues faced by financial institutions and their government supervisors. We argue that while the GVAR model is probably useful for...