A series of crisis and emergency interest rate cuts has brought global interest rates towards zero and government debt to historical records. The paper discusses the exit options from unconventional monetary policies and unsustainable government debt. First, the paper sheds light on the...

The belief that the ECB follows the US Federal Reserve in setting its policy is so entrenched with market participants and commentators that the search for empirical support would seem to be a trivial task. However, this is not the case. We find that the ECB is indeed often influenced by the...

This paper analyses the monetary policy interdependence between the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Federal Reserve (Fed) for the period 1999-2006. Two models are specified: a partial Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) and a general VECM. In the partial VECM, we look for a long-run...

This paper examines the effect of government ideology on monetary policy in a quarterly data set of 15 OECD countries in the period 1980.1-2005.4. Our Taylor-rule specification focuses on the interactions of a new time-variant indicator for central bank independence and government ideology. The...

We analyze the importance of global shocks for the global economy and national policy makers. More specifically, we investigate whether monetary policy has become less effective in the wake of financial globalization. We also examine whether there is increasing uncertainty for central banks due...

We assess the differences that emerge in Taylor rule estimations for the ECB when using ex-post data instead of real time forecasts and vice versa.We argue that previous comparative studies in this field mixed up two separate effects. First, the differences resulting from the use of ex-post and...

This paper deals with potential instabilities in the Eurozone stemming from an insufficient interplay between monetary policy and reform effort on the one hand and the emergence of intra-Euro area divergences on the other. As a first step, we assess the effect of EMU on structural reform and...

This paper examines the interactions between money, interest rates, goods and commodity prices at a global level. For this purpose, we aggregate data for major OECD countries and follow the Johansen/Juselius cointegrated VAR approach. Our empirical model supports the view that, when controlling...

We develop a roadmap of how the ECB should further reduce the volume of money (money supply) and roll back credit easing in order to prevent inflation. The exits should be step-by-step rather than one-off . Communicating about the exit strategy must be an integral part of the exit strategy....