Inflation has been well contained over the last decades in most industrialized countries. This implies, however, that memories of high inflation are likely to fade, because over time larger parts of the population have never experienced high inflation, whereas those who have might forget. This...

This paper analyses the existence of an immigrant/native wealth gap by using household survey data for Luxembourg, Germany and Italy. The results show that, in all three countries, a sizeable wealth gap exists between natives and immigrants. Towards the upper tail of the wealth distribution the...

Monitoring and forecasting price developments in the euro area is essential in the light of the second pillar of the ECBu0092s monetary policy strategy. This study analyses whether the forecasting accuracy of forecasting aggregate euro area inflation can be improved by aggregating forecasts of...

This paper examines the degree of price rigidity in Belgian consumer prices, using a large database. As to the observed degree of rigidity, the results reveal a substantial amount of heterogeneity, not only across but also within product categories. While prices turn out to be perfectly flexible...

This is a survey on the recent game theoretic literature on committee decision making. We consider theoretical work on the role of (i) strategic voting, (ii) costly information acquisition, (iii) conflicting interests, and (iv) communication in committees. Moreover, we review recent experimental...

This paper investigates the in inflationary effects of fscal policy in an optimizing general equilibrium monetary model with capital accumulation, exible prices and wealth effects. The model is calibrated to Euro Area quarterly data. Simulation results show that government defcits, high debt...

This paper examines the feasibility of implementing Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) Control in structural cointegrated VAR models and sheds some light on the two major problems generated by such implementation. The first aspect to be taken into account is the effect of the presence of unit roots...

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...

This paper investigates the performance of optimised interest rate rules when there is uncertainty about a key determinant of the monetary transmission mechanism, namely the degree of persistence characterising the inflation process. The paper focuses on the euro area and utilises two variants of...