This paper examines the welfare implications of a country joining a currency union as opposed to operating in a flexible exchange rate regime. At the country level, the suboptimal response to domestic and foreign shocks and the inability of setting inflation at the desired level may be offset by...

In this paper, I evaluate the performance deterioration that occurs when the central bank employs an optimal targeting rule that is based on incorrect parameter values. I focus on two parameters — the degree of inflation inertia and the degree of price stickiness. I explicitly account for the...

The paper assesses the communication strategies of the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank and their effectiveness. We find that the effectiveness of communication is not independent from the decisionmaking process in the committee. The paper shows that the Federal...

Financial frictions affect the way in which different components of GDP respond to a monetary policy shock. We embed the financial accelerator of Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999) into a medium-scale Dynamic General Equilibrium model and evaluate the relative importance of financial...

The paper evaluates the ability of market participants to anticipate monetary policy decisions in the euro area and in 13 other countries. First, by looking at the magnitude and the volatility of the changes in the money market rates we show that the days of policy meetings are special days for...

This paper shows that the credibility gain from permanently committing to a fixed exchange rate by joining the European Monetary Union can outweigh the loss from giving up independent monetary policy. When the central bank enjoys only limited credibility a pegged exchange rate regime yields a...

This paper studies optimal discretionary policy with parameter uncertainty about inflation inertia. Optimal policy rules and impulse responses are presented within a hybrid New-Keynesian model estimated for the euro area by Smets (2003). We find that it may be optimal for policy to respond more...