The use of explicit inflation targets has meant that monetary policy has become more transparent and also easier to evaluate. The analysis in this paper is based on forecasts by Sveriges Riksbank (the central bank of Sweden) on real output and inflation. Our purpose is to separate the effects on...

This paper studies how wages and employment are affected by unemployment insurance when there is endogenous labor mobility. In a simple model with symmetric sectors, it is shown that introducing labor mobility reduces the wage level, and thereby also unemployment. It is also shown that an...

The central bank's optimal reaction to foreign and domestic shocks is analyzed in an inflation targeting model allowing for incomplete exchange rate pass-through. Limited pass-through is incorporated through nominal rigidities in an aggregate supply-aggregate demand model derived from some...

This paper analyzes banks choice between lending to firms individually and sharing lending with other banks, when firms and banks are subject to moral hazard and monitoring is essential. Multiple-bank lending is optimal whenever the benefit of greater diversification in terms of higher...

In this paper we study 2-state Markov switching VAR models of monthly unemployment and inflation for three countries: Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States. The primary purpose is to examine if periods of low inflation are associated with high or low unemployment volatility. We find that...

A drawback of available portfolio credit risk models is that they fail to allow for default risk dependency across loans other than through common risk factors. Thereby, thesemodels ignore that close ties can exist between companies due to legal, financial and business relations. In this paper,...

A complete procedure for calculating the joint predictive distribution of future observations based on the cointegrated vector autoregression is presented. The large degree of uncertainty in the choise of the cointegration vectors is incorporated into the analysis through a prior distribution on...

In this paper, we offer one possible way to estimate a key feature of the Bank of Canada s main macroeconomic model, the Quarterly Projection Model or QPM. The key feature which is the focus of this study is the so-called short-run equilibrium values or SREQs which link the dynamic portion of...

The analysis of this paper demonstrates that when the Phillips curve has forward-looking components, a goal for average inflation - i.e. targeting a j-period average of one-period inflation rates - will cause inflation expectations to change in a way that improves the short-run trade-off faced...

Recent research have provided evidence that backward-looking models fit the data well while purely forward-looking models seem to be inconsistent with data. Consequently, many recent papers in the monetary policy rule literature have used hybrid models, which contain both backward- and...