We develop a general equilibrium model of an emerging market economy where productivity growth differentials between tradable and non-tradable sectors result in an equilibrium appreciation of the real exchange rate-the so-called Balassa-Samuelson effect. The paper explores the dynamic properties...

Restaurant prices in the euro area saw an unprecedented increase after the introduction of the euro. We use an extension of commonly used models of sticky prices and argue that the increase in restaurant prices can be explained by menu costs. The extension we use involves the state-dependent...

We study the rejection of the expectations hypothesis within a New Keynesian business cycle model. Earlier research has shown that the Lucas general equilibrium asset pricing model can account for neither sign nor magnitude of average risk premia in forward prices, and is unable to explain...

Within a New Keynesian business cycle model, we study variables that are normally unobservable but are very important for the conduct of monetary policy, namely expected inflation and inflation risk premia. We solve the model using a third-order approximation that allows us to study time-varying...

Central banks behave purposefully when they set monetary policy, basing their decisions upon the data that is available and upon their understanding of the economy. At the same time, policy decisions affect economic outcomes, and the likelihood of observing a given state of the world. This paper...

We show that the composition of international trade has important implications for the optimal volatility of the exchange rate, above and beyond the size of trade flows. Using an analytically tractable small open economy model, we characterize the impact of the trade composition on the policy...

We compute the tradable and non-tradable input shares for consumption and investment from the latest release of OECD input–output tables. We document that input shares (the content of tradable and non-tradable goods per unit of final demand) differ substantially from final demand shares (the...

We investigate how real-time parameter learning, optimal policies and the volatility of exogenous shocks affect the policymakers’ ability to distinguish across competing models of the economy. The detection speed of model misspecification depends only on the relative volatility of supply and...

We show that the composition of imports has important implications for the optimal volatility of the exchange rate. Using input-output data for 25 countries we document substantial differences in the import and non-tradable content of final demand components, and in the role played by imported...