Despite constituting the very heart of the monetary transmission mechanism, widespread misconceptions still exist regarding how monetary policy is implemented. This paper highlights the key misconceptions in this regard and shows how they have compromised the understanding of important aspects...

This paper attempts to conceptualize the debate regarding the role of asset prices and perceived financial imbalances in the formation of monetary policy from the perspective of theoretically optimal policy responses. While much of the disagreement can be reconciled within the framework of...

A popular strategy for estimating output gaps is to anchor them to structural economic relationships. The resulting output gaps, however, are often highly sensitive to numerous auxiliary assumptions inherent in the approach. This complicates their use in policymaking. We illustrate the point...

This paper presents an analysis of capital market integration grounded in the intertemporal model of the current account. The model is extended to encompass liquidity constraints and fitted to data for euro-area countries and Italian and Canadian regions. With respect to capital mobility,...