This introductory essay briefly summarizes the 11 empirical studies of price setting and price adjustment that are included in this special issue. The studies, which use data from several European countries, were conducted as part of the European Central Bank's Inflation Persistence Network....

This paper uses information from a rich firm-level survey on wage and price-setting procedures, in around 15,000 firms in 15 European Union countries, to investigate the relative importance of internal versus external factors in the setting of wages of newly hired workers. The evidence suggests...

This paper investigates why the slope of the yield curve predicts future economic activity in Germany and the United States. A structural VAR is used to identify aggregate supply, aggregate demand, monetary policy and inflation scare shocks and to analyse their effects on the real, nominal and...

The Paper provides new tools for the evaluation of DSGE models, and applies it to a large-scale New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with price and wage stickiness and capital accumulation. Specifically, we approximate the DSGE model by a vector autoregression (VAR),...

In the identified VAR literature the role of the exchange rate in measuring monetary policy shocks has often been neglected. However, many open economies find it useful to target the exchange rate. In such a regime exchange rate innovations will better capture domestic monetary policy shocks....

The work presented in this paper falls into two parts. First, using a simple model and within the context of the central bank's objective of price stability, it is shown that the optimal monetary response to unexpected changes in asset prices depends on how these changes affect the central...

In this paper we compare the effects of monetary policy on output and prices in the G-7 countries using a parsimonious macroeconometric model comprising, output, prices and a short-term interest rate. We identify monetary policy shocks by assuming that they do not affect real output...

During the European exchange market turmoil in 1992-93 it was evident that speculative attacks tended to spread across currencies. Using a twocountry version of the model developed by Flood and Garber (1984) we show how a speculative attack against one currency may accelerate the "warranted"...

The paper aims at deriving some stylised facts for financial, real, and monetary policy developments during asset price booms by means of aggregating information contained in 38 boom periods since the 1970s for 18 OECD countries. We observe 26 macroeconomic variables in a pre-boom, boom and...

Using a standard New-Keynesian model, this paper examines three reasons why monetary policy should primarily focus on price stability rather than the stabilization of output around potential, even if there appears to be an exploitable trade-off between the volatility of inflation and that of the...