This report discusses the role of the European Union’s full employment objective in the conduct of the ECB’s monetary policy. It first reviews a range of indicators of full employment, highlights the heterogeneity of labour market outcomes within different groups in the population and across...

The ECB’s price stability mandate has been defined by the Treaty. But the Treaty has not spelled out what price stability precisely means. To make the mandate operational, the Governing Council has provided a quantitative definition in 1998 and a clarification in 2003. The landscape has...

Differences in labour market institutions and regulations between countries of the monetary union can cause divergent responses even to a common shock. We augment a multi-country model of the euro area with search and matching framework that differs across Ricardian and hand-to-mouth households....

In the low inflation and low interest rate environment that prevailed over the period 2013-2020, many argued that besides expansionary monetary policy, expansionary fiscal policy could also support central banks' efforts to bring inflation closer to target. During the pandemic, proper alignment...

This paper explores the link between agent expectations and housing market dynamics. We focus on shifts in the fundamental driving forces of the economy that are anticipated by rational forward-looking agents, i.e. news shocks. Using Bayesian methods and U.S. data, we find that...