Was UK inflation more stable and/or less uncertain before 1914 or after 1945? We address these questions by estimating a statistical model with changing volatilities in transient and persistent components of inflation. Three conclusions emerge. First, since periods of high and low volatility...

Monetary policy in the US is characterized by a substantial degree of inertia. While in principle this may well be the outcome of an optimizing central bank behaviour, the ability of any derived policy rule to match the data relies on so large weights for interest rate smoothing into policy...

Economic activities are highly clustered. Why is geographic concentration becoming a predominant feature of industrialized economies? On the basis of the empirical models developed by the new theories of international trade, our answer is that increasing returns are the driving force of economic...

This paper investigates the empirical relevance of a new framework for monetary policy analysis in which the decision makers are allowed to weight differently positive and negative deviations of inflation and output from the target values. Reduced-form and structural estimates of the central...

The quadratic form of policy makers' loss function has gained a wide consensus in monetary policy analysis mainly because of its analytical tractability. A number of researchers, however, have recently proposed alternative functional forms which have also proved to yield tractable solutions of...

This paper investigates the empirical relevance of a new framework for monetary policy analysis in which the decision makers are allowed to weight differently positive and negative deviations of inflation and output from the target values. Reduced-form and structural estimates of the central...

This paper documents a new stylized fact of the U.S. greater macroeconomic stability of the last two decades or so. Using 131 monthly time series, three popular statistical methods and the forecasts of the Federal Reserve's Green book and the Survey of Professional Forecasters, we show that the...

The Fed closely monitors the stock market and the stock market continuously forms expectations about the Fed decisions. What does this imply for the relation between the fed funds rate and the S&P500? We find that the answer depends on the conditions prevailing on the financial market. During...

Inflation in the most industrialized economies of the world has an important international common component that accounts for the historical decline in the national rates. Country specific conditions explain the rise in inflation volatility of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the subsequent...

Was the Great Moderation in the United States due to good policy or good luck? Taking, as data generation process, a New Keynesian sticky-price model in which the only source of change is the move from a passive to an active monetary rule, we show how standard econometric methods, both...