In a number of countries a substantial proportion of mortgage loans is denominated in foreign currency. In this paper we demonstrate how their presence affects economic policy and agents’ welfare. To this end we construct a small open economy model with financial frictions where housing loans...

Since the creation of the euro area significant interest rate spreads have arisen between euro area countries, both for public and private debt. We check whether these spreads could be made to work towards the goal of providing more stability to the euro area. In particular we focus on reducing...

For the successful conduct of monetary policy the central bank needs reliable indicators of the monetary policy stance. A recently often advocated one is the gap between the real, market and the natural rate of interest. In this article we estimate the historical time series of the natural rate...

We evaluate two most popular approaches to implementing financial frictions into DSGE models: the Bernanke et al. (1999) setup, where financial frictions enter through the price of loans, and the Kiyotaki and Moore (1997) model, where they concern the quantity of loans. We take both models to...

We generalize the concept of the natural rate of interest (Laubach and Williams, 2003; Woodford, 2003) by defining and estimating the the natural yield curve (NYC) - the term structure of natural interest rates. Our motivation stems i.a. from the observation that at times when central banks attempt...

We estimate forward-looking Taylor rules on data from macroeconomic forecasts of three central banks (Bank of England, National Bank of Poland and Swiss National Bank) in order to determine the extent to which these banks are forward looking in their monetary policy decisions. We find that all...

It is well-known that central bank policies affect not only macroeconomic aggregates, but also their distribution across economic agents. Similarly, a number of papers demonstrated that heterogeneity of agents may matter for the transmission of monetary policy on macro variables. Despite this,...

In a New Keynesian model with asymmetric information we show that publication of macroeconomic projections and of the future interest rate path by the central bank can improve macroeconomic outcomes. However, the gains from publishing interest rate paths are small relative to those from...

We use data on enterprise level from a survey of medium sized and big companies to test for downward nominal wage rigidity in Poland. We find relatively weak support for downward nominal wage rigidity when average total compensation in the enterprise is taken into account. However, since this...

We evaluate two most popular approaches to implementing financial frictions into DSGE models: the Bernanke et al. (1999) setup, where frictions affect the price of loans, and the Kiyotaki and Moore (1997) model, where they concern the quantity of loans. We take both models to the data and check...