The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the U.S. Federal Reserve publishes the range of members' forecasts for key macroeconomic variables, but not the distribution of forecasts within this range. To evaluate these projections, previous papers compare the midpoint of the ranges with the...

National accounts data are always revised. Not only recent data, but also figures dating many years back can be revised substantially. This means that there is a danger that an important part of the central bank's information set is flawed for a long period of time. In this paper we present a...

Over the past 15 years there has been remarkable progress in the specification and estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. Central banks in developed and emerging market economies have become increasingly interested in their usefulness for policy analysis and...

Over the past 15 years there has been remarkable progress in the specification and estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. Central banks in developed and emerging market economies have become increasingly interested in their usefulness for policy analysis and...

This paper presents a model of asymmetric (S,s) pricing. We investigate whether the asymmetry on micro level is carried over on macro level and what is the role of agent heterogeneity in the process. We look at two kinds of asymmetries: (i) asymmetric output responses monetary shocks and (ii)...

Von Kritikern der Europäischen Währungsunion wird oft behauptet, die realwirtschaftliche Entwicklung in den einzelnen Regionen sei zu unterschiedlich, als dass eine einheitliche Geldpolitik effizient sein könne. Wie berechtigt solche Befürchtungen sind, lässt sich durch einen Vergleich des...

We examine an interesting puzzle in monetary economics between what monetary authorities claim (namely to be forward-looking and pre-emptive) and the poor stabilization properties routinely reported for forecast-based rules. Our resolution is that central banks should be viewed as following...

The objectives of this paper are: first, to quantify the stabilization welfare gains from commitment; second, to examine how commitment to an optimal rule can be sustained as an equilibrium and third, to find a simple interest rate rule that closely approximates the optimal commitment one. We...

This paper explores the role that inflation forecasts play in the uncertainty surrounding the estimated effects of alternative monetary rules on unemployment dynamics in the euro area and the US. We use the inflation forecasts of 8 competing models in a standard Bayesian VAR to analyse the size...

This paper compares two contrasting approaches to robust monetary policy design. The first developed by Hansen and Sargent (2003, 2007) assumes unstructured model uncertainty and uses a minimax robustness criterion to design monetary rules. This contrasts with an older literature that structures...