This paper offers an alternative explanation for the behavior of postwar US inflation by measuring a novel source of monetary policy time-inconsistency due to Cukierman (2002). In the presence of asymmetric preferences, the monetary authorities end up generating a systematic inflation bias...

The announced primary objective of the European Central Bank is price stability. While no restrictive reference is given to how the goal should be reached, such a mandate can be thought as a concern to stabilize some relevant macroeconomic aggregates. Accordingly, we frame ECB monetary policy in...

The announced primary objective of the European Central Bank is price stability. While no restrictive reference is given to how the goal should be reached, such a mandate can be thought as a concern to stabilize some relevant macroeconomic aggregates. Accordingly, we frame ECB monetary policy in...

Using a structural VAR with time-varying parameters and stochastic volatility on post-WWII U.S. data, we document a striking negative correlation between the evolution of the long-run coefficient on inflation in the monetary rule and the evolution of the persistence and predictability of...

Monetary policy in the US is characterized by a substantial degree of inertia. While in principle this may well be the outcome of an optimizing central bank behavior, the ability of any derived policy rule to match the data relies on so large weights for interest rate smoothing into policy...

The design of monetary policy depends upon the targeting strategy adopted by the central bank. This strategy describes a set of policy preferences, which are actually the structural parameters to analyse monetary policy making. Accordingly, we develop a novel calibration method to identify...

This paper investigates the empirical relevance of a new framework for monetary policy analysis in which the decision-makers are allowed to weight differently positive and negative deviations of inflation and output from the target values. Reduced-form and structural estimates of the central...