Financial intermediation and bank spreads are important elements in the analysis of business cycle transmission and monetary policy. We present a simple framework that introduces lending relationships, a relevant feature of financial intermediation that has been so far neglected in the monetary...

Staggered prices are a fundamental building block of New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. In the standard model, prices are uniformly staggered but recent empirical evidence suggest that deviations from uniform staggering are common, This paper analyzes how...

We argue that it is not necessary for the central bank to react to the exchange rate to have a desirable outcome in the economy. Indeed, when the Taylor rule includes contemporane-ous data on the variables in the rule, the central bank can disregard from the exchange rate as long as there is...

We develop a New Keynesian model with staggered price and wage setting where downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR) arises endogenously through the wage bargaining institutions. It is shown that the optimal (discretionary) monetary policy response to changing economic conditions then becomes...

This paper investigates the econometric properties of the Taylor (1993) rule applied to U.S., Australian and Swedish data to judge its empirical relevance. Little attention has been paid to the time series properties of the data underlying interest rate rules, nor the estimations themselves,...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the dynamic effects of uncertainty on firm-level capital accumulation. A novelty in this paper is that the firm-level uncertainty indicator is motivated and derived from a theoretical model, the neoclassical investment model with time to build. This...

Much of the information communicated by central banks is noisy or imperfect. This paper considers the potential benefits and limitations of central bank communications in a model of imperfect knowledge and learning. It is shown that the value of communicating imperfect information is ambiguous....

The co-movements of nominal exchange rates and short-term interest rates as the economy is hit by shocks is a potential source of ex post deviations from uncovered interest rate parity. This paper investigates whether an established model of endogenous monetary policy in an open economy is...

How does central bank conservatism affect labor market reform? In this paper we examine the economic forces at work. An increase in conservatism triggers two opposite effects. It reduces the inflation bias of discretionary monetary policy and hence the benefits of a reform. It also increases...

Recently macroeconomic researchers have begun studying models of optimal monetary policy within the Real Business Cycle (RBC) framework. A standard RBC model is augmented by New Keynesian elements like sticky prices and monopolistically competitive firms. The monetary authority acts as a social...