Policy counterfactuals based on estimated structural VARs routinely suggest that bringing Alan Greenspan back in the 1970s’ United States would not have prevented the Great Inflation. We show that a standard policy counterfactual suggests that the Bundesbank–which is near-universally...

The enlargement of the European monetary union to include the accession countries (ACs) will not lead to higher average inflation in the enlarged euro area, but only to inflation redistribution across countries if continuity of the monetary policy framework is preserved. In the short term,...

We evaluate the Friedman-Schwartz hypothesis that a more accommodative monetary policy could have greatly reduced the severity of the Great Depression. To do this, we first estimate a dynamic, general equilibrium model using data from the 1920s and 1930s. Although the model includes eight...

Previous research has shown that the US business cycle leads the European cycle by a few quarters, and can therefore help predicting euro area GDP. We investigate whether financial variables provide additional predictive power. We use a VAR model of the US and the euro area GDPs and extend it to...

Building on the New Area Wide Model, we develop a 4-region macroeconomic model of the euro area and the world economy. The model (EAGLE, Euro Area and Global Economy model) is microfounded and designed for conducting quantitative policy analysis of macroeconomic interdependence across regions...

We quantitatively assess the macroeconomic effects of country-specific supply-side reforms in the euro area by simulating EAGLE, a multi-country dynamic general equilibrium model. We consider reforms in the labor and services markets of Germany (or, alternatively, Portugal) and the rest of the...

This paper conducts a comparative analysis of the performances of the forward guidance strategies adopted by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Norges Bank and the Riksbank, with the aim to gauge whether forward guidance via publication of an own interest rate path enhances a central bank’s...

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 offers an alternative explanation for the behavior of postwar US inflation by measuring a novel source of monetary policy time-inconsistency due to Cukierman (2002). In the presence of asymmetric preferences, the monetary authorities end up generating a systematic inflation bias...

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....