Some committees convene behind closed doors while others publicly discuss issues and make their decisions. This paper studies the role of open and closed committee decision making in presence of external influence. We show that restricting the information of interest groups may reduce the bias...

This paper investigates the performance of optimised interest rate rules when there is uncertainty about a key determinant of the monetary transmission mechanism, namely the degree of persistence characterising the inflation process. The paper focuses on the euro area and utilises two variants...

A two-country sticky-price model is used to analyse the interactions between fiscal and monetary policy. The role of an 'activist' fiscal policy as a stabilisation tool is considered and a measure of the welfare gains from international fiscal policy cooperation is derived. It is found that...

This paper investigates the inflationary effects of fiscal policy in an optimising general equilibrium monetary model with capital accumulation, flexible prices and wealth effects. The model is calibrated to Euro Area quarterly data. Simulation results show that government deficits, high debt...

Price level targeting has been proposed as an alternative to inflation targeting that may confer benefits if a central bank sets policy under discretion, even if society's loss function is specified in terms of inflation (instead of price level) volatility. This paper demonstrates the...

This study analyses international monetary policy co-operation in a two-country dynamic general equilibrium model with nominal rigidities, monopolistic competition and producer currency pricing. A quadratic approximation to the utility of the consumers is derived and assumed as the policy...

This paper reviews the key economic issues concerning the welfare costs of inflation and deflation, with a view to shedding light on the desirable properties of the inflation process. Our review of the evidence on the overall costs of inflation and deflation indicates that such costs could be...

A number of authors have attempted to test whether the U.S. economy is in a determinate or an indeterminate equilibrium. We argue that to answer this question, one must impose a priori restrictions on lag length that cannot be tested. We provide examples of two economic models. Model 1 displays...

We link life-satisfaction data to inequality of the pre- and post-government income distribution at the regional level, to estimate the degree of inequality aversion. Three different inequality measures are used. In addition, we investigate whether a reduction in inequality by the state...