After the switch to a floating exchange rate in 1973, the Swiss National Bank at first adopted annual monetary targets and in the 1990s shifted to a medium-term targeting strategy. In this paper I review the SNBu0092s internal policy analysis, an aspect of Swiss monetary targeting that has...

A two-country sticky-price model is used to analyse the interactions between fiscal and monetary policy. The role of an u0091activistu0092 fiscal policy as a stabilisation tool is considered and a measure of the welfare gains from international fiscal policy cooperation is derived. It is found...

The presence of a lower bound of zero on nominal interest rates has important implications for the conduct of optimal monetary policy. Standard rational expectations models can have alternative steady states as well as non-unique laws of motion, i.e. there can be possible sunspot equilibria....

We use a Vector Auto Regression (VAR) analysis to explore the (spill-over) effects of fiscal policy shocks in Europe. To enhance comparability with the existing literature, we first analyse the effects of these shocks at the national level. Here, we employ identification based on Choleski...

The behaviour of the exchange rate under a floating exchange rate regime for a small open economy with perfect capital mobility may appear like a managed float or even a firmer peg. We present a canonical new neo-classical synthesis open economy model where the central bank follows a strategy...

In the context of a stylised game theoretical framework of capital tax competition, we show that when repeated policy interactions are associated to a systematic punishment of the deviating policymaker, a co-ordinated outcome can be the solution to the non co-operative tax game. This result...

Given the consolidation needs and the provisions of the new fiscal rule, budgetary planning in Germany has become more demanding. Fiscal projections are already difficult since the link between total tax revenue and economic activity is observed to be unstable. This Country Focus identifies...

This study focuses on the most important drivers of the swift current account rebalancing which is taking place in Estonia and considers the possible way forward. After very large deficits in the boom years (2005-2007), Estonia's current account balance turned positive in the downturn, as...