Inflation-targeting central banks have only imperfect knowledge about the effect of policy decisions on inflation. An important source of uncertainty is the relationship between inflation and unemployment. This paper studies the optimal monetary policy in the presence of uncertainty about the...

This paper studies the effects of labor market outcomes on firms' loan demand and on credit intermediation. In a first step, I investigate how wages in the production sector affect bank net worth and the process of financial intermediation in partial equilibrium. Second, the role of the...

This paper develops a stochastic two-country "perpetual youth" Dynamic New Keynesian model of the international business cycle with incomplete international financial markets and stationary net foreign assets. The model allows for a thorough analysis of the interaction of endogenous monetary...

We propose a novel framework to gauge the credibility of central banks' commitment to an inflation-targeting regime. Our framework combines survey data on macroeconomic forecasts with high-frequency financial market data to understand how inflation targeting makes economic agents change their...

Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We...

This paper reveals and tests a new theoretical implication of the credit channel of monetary policy: as financial frictions (monitoring or auditing costs) increase, the reaction of stock prices to monetary policy shocks decreases. Correspondingly, towards the end of the Enron accounting scandal,...

We study the properties of the optimal nominal interest rate policy under different levels of price indexation. In our model indexation regulates the sources of inflation persistence. When indexation is zero, the inflation gap is purely forward- looking and inflation persistence depends only on...

The popular Calvo model with indexation (Christiano, Eichenbaum and Evans, 2005) and sticky information (Mankiw and Reis, 2002) model have guided much of the monetary policy discussion. The strength of these approaches is that they can explain the persistence of inflation. However, both of these...

In the Eurozone price stickiness differs among countries. I explore its consequences on the optimal rate of inflation in a two-country model. On the one hand, with local currencies an inflation tax is partly imposed on the foreign country, so it creates incentives to inflate. On the other hand,...