This paper examines the Swedish experience of forward guidance 2007-2018. We focus on three interrelated issues: first, the effects of forward guidance on the discussion within the Board of Directors of the Riksbank, second, on the communication between the Riksbank and the public, and third, on...

Negative interest rates were once seen as impossible outside the realm of economic theory. However, several central banks have recently adopted negative policy rates. The Federal Reserve is coming under increasing pressure to follow suit in the wake of the coronavirus crisis. This paper...

Romer and Romer (2004) propose a simple method to estimate monetary policy shocks using forecasts and real-time data. However, such data is not always (publicly) available, especially in a historical context. We explore the consequences of using revised data instead of the original forecast and...

The theoretical foundation of inflation targeting was laid out by the Swedish economist Knut Wicksell (1851-1926) in his groundbreaking treatise, Interest and Prices, published originally in German in 1898. Here he proposed price stability as the rule for monetary policy. Today, inflation...

This paper provides novel evidence on downward nominal wage rigidities and their allocative effects in Switzerland. We match individual wages from a bi-annual firm survey with information on annual income and employment from social security register data. We relevant downward nominal wage...

This paper relates Keynes's discussions of money, the state theory of money, financial markets, investors' expectations, uncertainty, and liquidity preference to the dynamics of government bond yields for countries with monetary sovereignty. Keynes argued that the central bank can influence the...

We study the short-run effects of monetary policy in a search-theoretic monetary model in which agents are subject to idiosyncratic liquidity shocks as well as aggregate monetary shocks. Namely, we analyze the role of the endogenous non-degenerate distribution of liquidity, liquidity...

We discover a consumption channel of monetary policy in a model with money and government bonds. When the central bank withdraws government bonds (short-term or long-term) through open market operations, it lowers re- turns on bonds. The lower return has a direct negative impact on consumption...

We argue that long-run inflation has nonlinear and state-dependent effects on unemployment, output, and welfare. Using panel data from the OECD, we document three correlations. First, there is a positive long-run relationship between anticipated inflation and unemployment. Second, there is also...

Economists often say that certain types of assets, e.g., Treasury bonds, are very 'liquid'. Do they mean that these assets are likely to serve as media of exchange or collateral (a definition of liquidity often employed in monetary theory), or that they can be easily sold in a secondary market,...