This paper uses a standard New Keynesian model to analyze the effects and implementation of various monetary policy frameworks in the presence of a low natural rate of interest and a lower bound on interest rates. Under a standard inflation-targeting approach, inflation expectations will be...

Loose financial conditions forecast high output growth and low output volatility up to six quarters into the future, generating time-varying downside risk to the output gap, which we measure by GDP-at-Risk (GaR). This finding is robust across countries, conditioning variables, and time periods....

This paper examines the effect of financial frictions on the consumption of durables and non-durables in a two-sector dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with sticky prices and heterogeneous agents. The financial frictions are a combination of loanto- value (LTV) and...

How well can a cryptocurrency serve as a means of payment? Cryptocurrencies need to overcome double spending by using costly mining and by delaying settlement. We formalize this insight through an incentive constraint that rules out double spending and pins down the welfare costs of a...

Monetary policy is believed to have a disproportionate effect on firms, depending on their size. Financially constrained firms with limited access to capital markets are expected to be more sensitive to changes in interest rates; this is characteristic of small firms. This paper empirically...

The recent financial crisis shed a new light on issues that, previously, were not perceived as serious or important. It highlighted the close ties between fiat money and government bonds denominated in it that imply a strong relationship between Treasury and Central Bank. Two ill-conceived views...

This study is concerned with the determinants of monetary policy in the ERM countries.We derive a monetary policy rule, an interest rate rule, from a minimization problem faced by the central bank. The loss fuction trades off costs of interest rate instability against benefits from successful...

This paper analyses the prerequisites for and the results of unanimous monetary policy decisions in a monetary union consisting of heterogeneous members.The analysis is based on a multicountry version of Rogoff's model of the determination of monetary policy in the presence of supply shocks.It...

The study deals with the international transmission of economic shocks, their consequences for exchange rates and the reconciliation of exchange rate management with monetary policy. The theoretical part of the study consists of a mainstream model of two large, interdependent economies with...

This paper argues that, despite the substantial independence offered by the Maastricht Treaty, the ESCB will wish to bind itself by a set of voluntary rules in the conduct of monetary policy.This binding will occur because of the demands of policy itself.The ESCB as such has no history of a...