Is the United States best served by a single currency? This question is explored in this paper by looking at the regional effects of U.S. monetary policy shocks through the perspective of the Optimal Currency Area framework. Using monthly state-level data for the period 1983:1 to 2008:3, this...

This paper investigates the relationship between economic divergence and expansionary monetary policies within the eurozone based on a new divergence indicator. We study the dynamics between the economic divergence of member states and unconventional monetary policy in a Bayesian SVAR and find a...

Monetary policy in CEE is an important determinant in the wage bargaining process, because trade unions have to predict inflation as one component of future real wages. This paper scrutinizes whether countries in CEE that officially announce an inflation target are tempted to act...

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the state of macroeconomic modeling and the use of macroeconomic models in policy analysis has come under heavy criticism. Macroeconomists in academia and policy institutions have been blamed for relying too much on a particular class of...

Central banks have recently introduced new policy initiatives, including a policy called Quantitative Easing (QE). Since it has been argued by the Bank of England that 'Standard economic models are of limited use in these unusual circumstances, and the empirical evidence is extremely limited'...

This paper investigates the effectiveness of the quantitative easing policy, as implemented by the Bank of England in March 2009. Similar policies had been previously implemented in Japan, the U.S. and the Eurozone. The effectiveness is measured by the impact of Bank of England policies...

Do financial market participants free-ride on liquidity? To address this question, we construct a dynamic general equilibrium model where agents face idiosyncratic preference and technology shocks. A secondary financial market allows agents to adjust their portfolio of liquid and illiquid assets...

Using post-1995 Japanese data we propose a theory-based sign-restriction SVAR approach to identify monetary policy shocks when the economy is at the zero-lower bound. The identifying restrictions accord with predictions of corresponding DSGE models. Our results show that while a quantitative...

This paper assesses the prospects for the new Polish monetary policy strategy of inflation targeting. Regarding the general requirements for implementing an inflation targeting strategy it appears that Poland has made sufficient progress in reducing fiscal dominance and hardening budget...

An increasing number of central banks implement monetary policy via two standing facilities: a lending facility and a deposit facility. In this paper we show that it is socially optimal to implement a non-zero interest rate spread. We prove this result in a dynamic general equilibrium model...