Central banks often face tradeoffs in how their monetary policy decisions impact economic activity (including employment), inflation and the price level. This paper assesses how these tradeoffs have evolved over time and varied across countries, with a focus on understanding the post-pandemic...

We use narrative evidence along with a novel database of real-time data and forecasts from the Bank of Canada's staff economic projections from 1974 to 2015 to construct a new measure of monetary policy shocks and estimate the effects of monetary policy in Canada. We show that it is crucial to...

This note proposes an update to Figure 1 in "Macroeconomic Shocks and their Propagation" in the Handbook of Macroeconomics of 2016 (Ramey, 2016). Figure 1 of Ramey (2016) reports Impulse-Response Functions (IRFs) of variables of interest to a shock in the Federal Funds Rate, following the...

The research work presented below addresses the possible concern of central bank independence through the development and application of econometric models. The complexity of the modelling has allowed a step further in corroborating that financial independence is not only linked to the...

To study implications of an interest-bearing CBDC on the economy, we integrate a New Monetarist-type decentralised market that explicitly accounts for the means-of-exchange function of bank deposits and CBDC into a New Keynesian model with financial frictions. The central bank influences the...

This paper analyses the distribution of long-term inflation expectations in the euro area using individual density forecasts from the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters. We exploit the panel dimension in this dataset to examine whether this distribution became less stable following the Great...

How wrong could policymakers be when using linearized solutions to their macroeconomic models instead of nonlinear global solutions? This question became of much practical interest during the Great Recession and the recent zero lower bound crisis. We assess the importance of nonlinearities in a...

A puzzle from the Great Recession is an apparent mismatch between a fall in the persistence of European inflation rates, and the increased variability of expert forecasts of inflation. We explain this puzzle and show how country specific beliefs about inflation are still quite close to the...

We analyse cycles in policy interest rates in 24 advanced economies over 1970-2024, combining a new application of business cycle methodology with rich time-series decompositions of the shocks driving rate movements. "Rate cycles" have gradually evolved over time, with less frequent cyclical...

We assess whether unconventional monetary and fiscal policy implemented in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. contribute to the 2021-2023 inflation surge through the lens of several different empirical methodologies-event studies, vector autoregressions, and regional panel regressions...