We find evidence that adopting an explicit inflation objective plays a role in anchoring long-run inflation expectations and in reducing the intrinsic persistence of inflation. For the period 1994-2003, private-sector long-run inflation forecasts exhibit significant correlation with lagged...

We study how the use of judgement or “add-factors” in macroeconomic forecasting may disturb the set of equilibrium outcomes when agents learn using recursive methods. We isolate conditions under which new phenomena, which we call exuberance equilibria, can exist in standard macroeconomic...

The rapid rise in the price of crude oil between 2004 and the summer of 2006 are the subject of debate. This paper investigates the factors that might have contributed to the oil price increase in addition to demand and supply for crude oil, by expanding a model for crude oil prices to include...

Equilibrium correction models of the price level are often used to model inflation. Such models assume that the long-run markup of prices over costs is fixed, but this may not be true for the Euro area economy, which has undergone major structural reforms over the last 25 years. We allow for...

Despite its important role in monetary policy and finance, the expectations hypothesis (EH) of the term structure of interest rates has received virtually no empirical support. The empirical failure of the EH was attributed to a variety of econometric biases associated with the single-equation...

The phrase “liquidity effect” was introduced by Milton Friedman (1969) to describe the first of three effects on interest rates caused by an exogenous change in the money supply. The lack of empirical support for the liquidity effect using monthly and quarterly data using various monetary...

The financial crisis has enhanced the need for close monitoring of financial flows in the economy of the euro area and at the global level focusing, in particular, on the development of financial imbalances and financial intermediation. In this context flow-of-funds analysis appears particularly...

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is undergoing profound changes, not only in its policies, but also in its internal governance. These changes reflect the structural developments in the global economy, and in particular the growing role of emerging economies that demand a greater say at the...

We argue that the existence of large amounts of specific human capital makes costly and slows down the adjustment in the labor market after large reallocation shocks. To illustrate this point we build a theoretical framework in which young agents’ career is heavily determined by initial...

In a perfect labor market severance payments can have no real effects as they can be undone by a properly designed labor contract (Lazear 1990). We give empirical content to this proposition by estimating the effects of EPL on entry wages and on the tenure-wage profile in a quasi-experimental...