Many central banks have come to rely on dynamic stochastic general equilibrium, or DSGE, models to inform their economic outlook and to help formulate their policy strategies. But while their use is familiar to policymakers and academics, these models are typically not well known outside these...

The empirical DSGE literature pays surprisingly little attention to the behavior of the monetary authority. Alternative policy rule specifications abound but their relative merit is rarely discussed. We provide some of this discussion by comparing the fit of a large set of interest rate rules...

Restaurant prices in the euro area increased dramatically after the introduction of the euro. We show that this increase can be explained by a common menu cost model, extended to include a state-dependent decision of firms on when to adopt the new currency. Two mechanisms drive this result....

We construct a price index with weights for the prices of different PCE (personal consumption expenditures) goods chosen to minimize the welfare costs of nominal distortions. In this cost-of-nominal-distortions index (CONDI), the weights are computed in a multi-sector New Keynesian model with...

Interest rate decisions by central banks are universally discussed in terms of Taylor rules, which describe policy rates as responding to inflation and some measure of the output gap. We show that an alternative specification of monetary policy, in which the interest rate tracks the Wicksellian...

This paper reviews the theoretical literature at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance to draw lessons on the connection between vulnerabilities in the financial system and the macroeconomy, and on how monetary policy affects that connection. This literature finds that financial...