Is the Euro area as a whole, or are individual Euro-area member countries facing a period of sustained lower economic growth, a phenomenon known as secular stagnation? We tackle this question by estimating equilibrium real interest rates and comparing them to actual real rates. Since the...

We turn our attention to the role of money for determining nominal magnitudes. Using US data, we find that the aggregate “nominal output plus and stock market capitalisation” is closely related to the money stock, lending support to one of Milton Friedman’s key monetarist propositions....

We assess the differences that emerge in Taylor rule estimations for the ECB when using expost 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...

We analyze the ECB Governing Council’s voting procedures. The literature has by now discussed numerous aspects of the rotation model but does not account for many institutional aspects of the voting procedure of the GC. Using the randomization scheme based on the multilinear extension (MLE) of...

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...