Fiscal rules are argued to be important for sound and sustainable fiscal policies and have been increasingly adopted over the last 20 years. As increased fiscal pressure and fiscal risks urge countries to address the public debt legacy left by recent economic crises, fiscal rules come under...

The ECB can fulfil its mandate better and contribute to a stronger Europe by adopting sensible rules instead of relying on discretionary decision-making. A simple rule for the policy rate can promote systematic monetary policy and protect against significant policy errors. Ending the reliance on...

The post-pandemic inflation surge underscores that monetary policy continues to be hampered by two long-standing challenges: the pretence of knowledge and the proclivity for discretion. Focusing on the Federal Reserve, this paper demonstrates how simple policy rules, designed to be robust under...

The combination of discretionary monetary policy, labor-market distortions and nominal wage rigidity yields an inflation bias as monetary policy tries to exploit nominal wage contracts to address labour-market distortions. Although an inflation target eliminates this inflation bias, it creates a...

In current practice, changes in the cyclically-adjusted budget balance (CAB) are interpreted as reflecting the effort of discretionary fiscal policy. This paper shows that such an interpretation is not a sufficiently accurate description of the behaviour of fiscal policy, as, in some cases, it...

This paper investigates the importance of fiscal policy in providing macroeconomic stabilisation in a monetary union. We use a microfounded New Keynesian model of a monetary union which incorporates persistence in inflation and non-Ricardian consumers, and derive optimal simple rules for fiscal...

The paper reviews the recent conduct of monetary policy and the central bank's rule-based behavior in Russia. Using different policy rules, we test whether the central bank in Russia reacts to changes in inflation, output gap and the exchange rate in a consistent and predictable manner. Our...

In this paper we adopt a Bayesian approach towards the estimation of the monetary policy preference parameters in a general equilibrium framework. We start from the model presented by Smets and Wouters (2003) for the euro area where, in the original set up, monetary policy behaviour is described...

We demonstrate the existence of multiple discretionary equilibria in a mainstream New Keynesian model with capital accumulation. There can be two monetary policy regimes, both of which satisfy conditions of optimality and time consistency. In a response to a cost-push shock one of the regimes...

Whether discretionary fiscal policies in industrialized countries act counter- or pro-cyclically and whether their reaction is symmetric or asymmetric over the cycle are still largely unsettled questions. This uncertainty remains even when attention is restricted to euro-area countries, where...