This paper has three objectives. First, it aims at revealing the logic of interest rate setting pursued by monetary authorities of 12 new EU members. Using estimation of an augmented Taylor rule, we find that this setting was not always consistent with the official monetary policy. Second, we...

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...

We construct a staggered-price dynamic general equilibrium model with overlapping generations based on uncertain lifetimes. Price stickiness plus lack of Ricardian Equivalence could be expected to make an increase in government debt, with associated changes in lumpsum taxation, effective in...

This paper examines whether the existence and the timing of real balance effects contribute to the determination of the absolute price level, as suggested by Patinkin (1949,1965), and if they affect conditions for local equilibrium uniqueness and stability. I show that there exists a unique...

Using a real-time data set for German GDP over the period from 1973 to 1998 we calculate various measures of real-time output gaps and use these to calibrate and estimate Taylor-type reaction functions for the Bundesbank. Most of the reaction functions we find fit the Bundesbank's actual policy,...

The correlation between persistent changes in the markup in one sector of an economy and the inflation rate is quantified in a 2-sector dynamic general equilibrium model. How this relationship is affected by monetary policy is also studied. We find that the correlation is in general positive...

The 'new open-economy macroeconomics' seeks to provide an improved basis for monetary and exchange-rate policy through the construction of open-economy models that feature rational expectations, optimising agents, and slowly adjusting prices of goods. This paper promotes an alternative approach...

We offer a contribution to the analysis of optimal monetary policy. The standard approach to determine what policy rule a central bank should follow is to take a single structural model and minimize the unconditional volatilities of inflation and real activity. In this paper, we propose monetary...