Central banks are dominant players in financial markets and economic policy. For both democratic and efficiency reasons, it is important that central banks' actions can be understood, predicted, and evaluated. Inflation-targeting central banks that publish their forecasts provide unique...

In this paper we study 2-state Markov switching VAR models of monthly unemployment and inflation for three countries: Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States. The primary purpose is to examine if periods of low inflation are associated with high or low unemployment volatility. To interpret...

The interest in empirical studies of monetary policy has increased in the last decade. The deregulation of financial markets and the increased use of explicit policy rules and targets have made monetary policy more transparent and interesting for economic analysis. This paper demonstrates how a...

In this paper we propose an alternative method for investigating the sources behind the behavior of real wages and unemployment. The statistical model we study is a certain structural error correction model, a so called common trends model, which has become popular in the empirical...

Using an empirical New-Keynesian model with optimal discretionary monetary policy, we estimate key parameters-the central bank's preference parameters; the degree of forward-looking behavior in the determination of inflation and output; and the variances of inflation and output shocks-to match...