Are specific developments in stock prices in line with fundamentals or do they reflect a rising bubble? And if the latter result applies, how is it possible to detect a bubble in real time? The answer to this question is of utmost relevance for a number of areas, not least for either financial...

This paper contributes to the literature on the properties of money and credit indicators for detecting asset price misalignments. After a review of the evidence in the literature on this issue, the paper discusses the approaches that can be considered to detect asset price busts. Considering a...

This paper models the relationship between consumer and asset prices (approximated by house prices, oil prices and the exchange rate) by means of a Markov Switching model (MS model). It can be shown that house prices appear to play a significant role in the determination of consumer prices in a...

Recently, a number of studies have made an attempt to deal with the key issue of the incompleteness of information available to the central bank when taking its monetary policy decisions. This study adds to this literature by tackling the problem with regard to the euro area. The analysis is...

This paper documents the analytical work that was carried out for the 2001 review of the assumption for the trend in M3 income velocity used to calculate the reference value for M3 growth. We analyse the medium-term trend in velocity using univariate time series tools and different money demand...

This study contains a set of estimates of reaction functions for the euro area based on a monthly data set starting in 1985. The main aim is to assess the performance of Taylor rules and to evaluate whether alternative specifications based, inter alia, on the inclusion of additional variables...

In this paper we compare the policy responsiveness of the Federal Reserve System, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the Bank of England. At first glance we find substantial differences in the frequency and amplitude of monetary policy decisions. Differences in the actual...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the dynamic relationships between some key variables for the euro area by means of a systems approach (i.e. so-called Vector Autoregression) and to simulate their responses with respect to monetary policy shocks. The main result is that rather simple...

This paper tackles the issue of the incompleteness of information available to the central bank when taking its monetary policy decisions. It is focused on euro area data and based on the simplistic assumption of the central bank following a simple monetary policy rule à-la-Taylor. Along the...

Despite the great importance and final success of the convergence process that led to the establishment of the European Monetary Union, there is no clear agreement regarding the monetary policy pursued in the member countries during the convergence process. This paper contributes to the...