When economists study incentives in organizations,the main focus has been on using monetary paymentsin exchange for performance on specific measurabledimensions. But organizations use a wide varietyof means to motivate their workers. One suchmethod which has not been studied much to date, isthe...

The paper discusses key elements of optimal central bank design and applies its findings to the Eurosystem. A particular focus is on the size of monetary policy committees, the degree of centralization, and the representation of relative economic size in the voting rights of regional (or...

This paper applies the Campbell-Shiller (1988) methodology to estimate a price dividend model with volatility and inflation risk, extending existing models in this field. The model fits the data well over the period 1979-2002 for the Euro Area, but less so for the U.S. The latter is interpreted...

This paper studies the international coordination of monetary policies in the world economy. It carefully discusses the process of policy competition and the structure of policy cooperation. As to policy competition, the focus is on monetary competition between Europe and America. Similarly, as...

This paper analyzes whether Taylor-type policy rules can be used to describe the behavior of the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank from the beginning of 1999 until mid 2002. Since there was no common monetary policy for the Euro area before 1999, we examine if the average Central...

We estimate monetary policy reaction functions for France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States using a Markov-switching model that incorporates switching in the monetary policy regime as well as an independent switching process for shifts in the state of the economy....

The very low interest rates and inflation rates of recent years has generated renewed interest in alternative policies that would not leave central banks trapped by the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates. Amongst this debate, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the possibility...