This paper outlines some issues regarding the interaction of independent fiscal authorities and one central bank in the European monetary union.It points out the possibilities for coordination failures,ranging everywhere from potentially excessive deficits and free-riding problems to...

We investigate the impact of the stance and path of monetary policy on the level of credit risk of individual bank loans and on lending standards. We employ the Credit Register of the Bank of Spain that contains detailed monthly information on virtually all loans granted by all credit...

Does time-varying business volatility affect the price setting of firms and thus the transmission of monetary policy into the real economy? To address this question, we estimate from the firm-level micro data of the German IFO Business Climate Survey the impact of idiosyncratic volatility on the...

It is argued that standard impulse response analysis based on vector autoregressive models has a number of shortcomings. Although the impulse responses are estimated quantities, measures for sampling variability such as confidence intervals are often not provided. If confidence intervals are...

How might central bank communication of its internal forecasts assist the conduct of monetary policy? The literature has shown that heterogeneous expectations may have destabilizing effects on aggregate dynamics. This paper analyzes through adaptive learning the policy implications of central...

Recent studies document the deteriorating performance of forecasting models during the Great Moderation, which conversely implies that forecastability was higher in the preceding era when the economy was unexpectedly volatile. We explain this phenomenon in the context of equilibrium...