We use an estimated monetary business cycle model with search and matching frictions in the labor market and nominal price and wage rigidities to study four countries (the U.S., the U.K., Sweden, and Germany) during the financial crisis and the Great Recession. We estimate the model over the...

We quantify the effects of monetary policy transparency and credibility on macroeconomic volatility in an estimated model of the Eurozone. In our model, private agents are unable to distinguish between temporary shocks to the central bank's monetary policy rule and persistent shifts in the...

Robust control allows policymakers to formulate policies that guard against model misspecification. The principal tools used to solve robust control problems are state-space methods (see Hansen and Sargent 2006 and Giordani and Soderlind 2004). In this paper we show that the structural-form...

We analyze the performance and robustness of some common simple rules for monetary policy in a New-Keynesian open economy model under different assumptions about the exchange rate model. Adding the exchange rate to an optimized Taylor rule gives only small improvements in terms of economic...

Simple models of monetary policy often imply optimal policy behavior that is considerably more aggressive than what is commonly observed. This paper argues that such counterfactual implications are due to model restrictions and a failure to account for multiplicative parameter uncertainty,...

We develop a structural model of a small open economy with gradual exchange rate pass-through and endogenous inertia in inflation and output. We then estimate the model by matching the implied impulse responses with those obtained from a VAR model estimated on Swedish data. Although our model is...

Using an empirical New-Keynesian model with optimal discretionary monetary policy, we estimate key parameters-the central bank's preference parameters; the degree of forward-looking behavior in the determination of inflation and output; and the variances of inflation and output shocks-to match...

We use robust control techniques to study the effects of model uncertainty on monetary policy in an estimated, semi-structural, small-open-economy model of the U.K. Compared to the closed economy, the presence of an exchange rate channel for monetary policy not only produces new trade-offs for...

I revisit the potential costs and benefits for Sweden of joining the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) of the European Union. I first show that the Swedish business cycle since the mid-1990s has been closely correlated with the Euro area economies, suggesting that common shocks have been an...