How does transparency, a key feature of central bank design, affect the deliberation of monetary policymakers? We exploit a natural experiment in the Federal Open Market Committee in 1993 together with computational linguistic models (particularly Latent Dirichlet Allocation) to measure the...

This paper investigates what has caused output and inflation volatility to fall in the US using a small scale structural model using Bayesian techniques and rolling samples. There are instabilities in the posterior of the parameters describing the private sector, the policy rule and the standard...

Some past studies analyzed Spanish monetary policy with the standard VAR. Their problem is that this method obliges researchers to impose a certain extreme form of the short run policy rule on their models. Hence, it does not allow researchers to study the possibility of structural changes in...

This paper reviews the recent literature on monetary policy rules. We exposit the monetary policy design problem within a simple baseline theoretical framework. We then consider the implications of adding various real world complications. Among other things, we show that the optimal policy...

This paper reconsiders the empirical evidence on the asymmetric output effects of monetary policy. Asymmetric effects is a common feature of many theoretical models, and there are many different versions of such asymmetries. We concentrate on the distinctions between positive and negative...

This paper investigates the contribution of monetary policy to the changes in output growth and inflation dynamics in the US. We identify a policy shock and a policy rule in a time-varying coefficients VAR using robust sign restrictions. The transmission of policy shocks has been relatively...

It is sometimes argued that the central banks influence the private economy in the short run through controlling a specific component of high powered money, not its total amount. Using a structural VAR approach, this paper evaluates this claim empirically, in the context of the Japanese economy....

This paper proposes a model of financial markets and corporate finance, with asymmetric information and no taxes, where equity issues, Bank debt and Bond financing may all co-exist in equilibrium. The paper emphasizes the relationship Banking aspect of financial intermediation: firms turn to...

Monetary policy is conducted in an environment of uncertainty. This paper sets up a model where the central bank uses real-time data from the bond market together with standard macroeconomic indicators to estimate the current state of the economy more efficiently, while taking into account that...

We investigate the relationship between monetary policy and inflation dynamics in the US using a medium scale structural model. The specification is estimated with Bayesian techniques and fits the data reasonably well. Policy shocks account for a part of the decline in inflation volatility; they...