This paper offers several contributions to actual research and discussion on monetary policy. It clarifies the relationship between uncertainty of inflation persistence and optimal monetary policy and discusses the consequences of the recent Blanchard proposal to implement a higher inflation...

We present a comprehensive disaggregate approach for short-term forecasting economic activity in Germany by explicitly taking into account the supply or production side and the demand side of GDP. The GDP figures calculated by the two sides usually yield different results and the official GDP...

Based on a stock-flow model of the housing market we estimate the relationship of house prices and explanatory macroeconomic variables in Germany using a regional panel dataset for 402 administrative districts. Using regional data exploits the variation across local housing markets and overcomes...

Against the background of the recent discussion whether the smoothing behavior of the Fed detected by empirical Taylor rules is indeed a fact or rather a statistically fiction, this paper re-examines the empirical evidence for interest rate smoothing for the case of the ECB. Based on data...