South Africa appears to share some of the characteristics (property price boom, easing of monetary policy, strong domestic demand growth) of asset price booms in industrial countries that were often followed by a period of weak growth. The international experience suggests that a number of...

Using monthly post-1995 Japanese data we propose a new sign-restriction based approach to identify monetary policy shocks when the economy is at the zero-lower bound (ZLB). The identifying restrictions are thoroughly grounded in liquidity trap theory. Our results show that a quantitative easing...

Shocks in the financial sector caused the great recession of 2008 and pulled down the real economy. To implement financial dynamics in a stylized DSGE-framework we use behavioral elements in expectations to produce waves of bull and bear cycles in the financial intermediation process, that have...

This paper presents a new mechanism through which monetary policy rules affect inflation persistence. When assuming that price reset hazard functions are not constant, backward-looking dynamics emerge in the NKPC. This new mechanism makes the traditional demand channel of monetary transmission...

This paper investigates to what extent Chinese monetary policy is constrained by the dollar peg. To this end, we use a cointegration framework to examine whether Chinese interest rates are driven by the Fed’s policy. In a second step, we estimate a monetary model for China, in which we include...

We integrate monetary policy-making by committee into a New Keynesian model to assess the consequences of the committee's institutional characteristics for inflation, output, and welfare. Our analysis delivers the following results. First, we demonstrate that transparency about the committee's...

We analyse the welfare properties of progressive income taxes in a stylized DSGE model of a currency union calibrated to the Eurozone. When the central bank follows a standard Taylor rule and volatility originates solely in productivity shocks, we find that considerable welfare gains can be...

This paper extends the discussion of international comovements of actual inflation rates to inflation expectations. Financial market expectations about inflation rates in the United States (US) and Euro Area (EA) are modeled in a structural vector autoregression (SVAR). We demonstrate how the...

In this paper we analyze the effects of changes in peoples' beliefs about the timing of the exit from Quantitative Easing ("tapering") on asset prices. To quantify beliefs of market participants, we use data from Twitter, the social media application, covering the entire Twitter volume on...

We quantify the international spillovers of explicit FOMC policy rate guidance used as an unconventional monetary policy tool at the zero lower bound of the policy rate on international equity markets, considering equity indices of both advanced and emerging economies. We find that explicit FOMC...