Euro area countries as a whole have experienced a marked downward trend over the 1980s. Over this period, the unemployment rate has increased and economic activity has been sluggish. Changes in the implicit inflation target, viewed as low frequency movements of inflation, might possibly explain...

The Euro area as a whole has experienced a marked downward trend in inflation over the past decades and, concomitantly, a protracted period of depressed activity. Can permanent and gradual shifts in monetary policy be held responsible for these dynamics? To answer this question, we embed...

We study how changes in the steady-state real interest rate affect the optimal inflation target in a New Keynesian DSGE model with trend inflation and a lower bound on the nominal interest rate. In this setup, a lower steady-state real interest rate increases the probability of hitting the lower...

We study how changes in the value of the steady-state real interest rate affect the optimal inflation target, both in the U.S. and the euro area, using an estimated New Keynesian DSGE model that incorporates the zero (or effective) lower bound on the nominal interest rate. We find that this...