This paper analyzes German and Spanish fiscal policy using simple policy rules. We choose Germany and Spain, as both are Member States in the European Monetary Union (EMU) and underwent considerable increases in public debt in the early 1990s. We focus on the question, how fiscal policy behaves...

This paper computes welfare-maximizing monetary and tax policy feedback rules in acalibrated dynamic general equilibrium model with sticky prices. The government makesexogenous final good purchases, levies a proportional income tax, and issues nominalone-period bonds. A quadratic approximation...

The estimation of an ordered probit model for currency reforms trying to end 31hyperinflations and three big inflations of the 20th century shows that the introduction of anindependent central bank and the adoption of a credibly fixed exchange rate are crucial for the successof a currency...

This paper provides empirical evidence in favor of the hypothesis thatthe secular price increase in the 16th century is mainly caused by money supplydevelopments as the discovery of new mines in Latin America. First we reviewprice developments for several European countries over the 16th century...

Inflation rates in a number of OECD follow a common trend over the past four decades: inflation starts out low in the 1960s, rises for a time before peaking in the 1970s or early 1980s, and then falls back to initial levels. This similarity in the behavior of trend inflation suggests that any...

The paper presents a monetary policy model with an endogenous capital stock when a backwardlooking element in wage setting causes inflation persistence. We analyse how the endogeneityof the capital stock changes the macroeconomic dynamics with which policy interacts and itsimplications for...

This paper considers the determination of aggregate price level under dispersed information.A Central Bank sets policy in response to its noisy measure of the price level, andeach agent makes its decisions by observing a subset of data. Information revealed to theagents and the bank is...

Using a model of island economy where financial markets aggregate dispersed informationof the public, we analyze how two-way communication between the central bankand the public affects inflation dynamics. When inflation target is observable and credibleto the public, markets provide the bank...

A central proposition in research on the role that banks play in the transmission mechanism is that monetary policy imparts a direct impact on deposits and that deposits, insofar as they constitute the supply of loanable funds, act as the driving force of bank lending. This paper argues that the...

This paper studies the optimal design of monetary policy in an optimizing two-country sticky price model. We suppose that the production sequence of final consumption goods stretches across both contries and is associated with vertical trade. Prices of final consumption goods are sticky in the...