The European Central Bank (ECB) strives to maintain inflation at a 2% target rate, yet the Euro area's diverse economies pose challenges to achieving this goal with a single nominal interest rate. Effective monetary policy transmission hinges on synchronizing the Natural Rate of Interest (NRI)...

We investigate the volatility of real interest rates in 10 countries. An equilibrium model with financial frictions mimics the volatility of real rates and predicts a negative correlation of the conditional variance with the business cycle. Our contribution investigates the level and conditional...

The current environment is characterized by low real rates and by policy rates close to or at their effective lower bound in all major financial areas. We analyze these unusual economic conditions from a secular perspective using data on aggregate consumption, wealth and asset returns. Our...

This paper presents an empirical evaluation of the strength of the Fisher effect which predicts a positive relationship between the nominal interest rate and inflation in the postwar period in the five major industrial countries, utilizing recently developed time series techniques. The results...