With gross government debt of 226% of GDP, Japan’s fiscal situation is in uncharted territory and puts the economy at risk. Japan needs a detailed and credible fiscal consolidation plan, including specific revenue increases and measures to control spending to restore its fiscal sustainability....

In health care, as in everything else, money matters. Of course, money is not the only thing that matters, but it matters a lot - perhaps more than all other factors combined. What we pay for and how we pay for it profoundly affect the care that is provided (and not provided), the settings in...

A vast literature has emerged using Taylor rules to analyze monetary policy Although very attractive both theoretically and empirically such rules imply a mechanical response by the policy variable to fundamental ones This study looks for empirical evidence of a more sophisticated monetary...

The paper shows that there is a substantial degree of heterogeneity in the ability of Fed watchers to forecast US monetary policy decisions. Based on a novel database for 268 professional forecasters since 1999, the average forecast error of FOMC decisions varies 5 to 10 basis points between the...

This paper uses a factor-augmented vector autoregressive model (FAVAR) estimated on U.S. data in order to analyze monetary transmission via private sector balance sheets, credit risk spreads and asset markets in an integrated setup and to explore the role of monetary policy in the three...

Liquidity plays an important role in explaining how banks determine their allocation of funds. This paper analyses whether this fact can explain the term structure of interest rates and yield spreads. The paper models banks' demand for liquidity in a manner similar to that used to study...

This paper estimates the path of inflation persistence in the United States over the last 50 years and draws implications about the evolution of the Federal Reserve's monetary-policy preferences. Standard models of central bank optimization predict that the central bank's preference for output...

This paper investigates the econometric properties of the Taylor (1993) rule applied to U.S., Australian and Swedish data to judge its empirical relevance. Little attention has been paid to the time series properties of the data underlying interest rate rules, nor the estimations themselves,...

This paper explores the role that the imperfect knowledge of the structure of the economy plays in the uncertainty surrounding the effects of rule-based monetary policy on unemployment dynamics in the euro area and the US. We employ a Bayesian model averaging procedure on a wide range of models...