The paper studies the inflation rate associated with optimal monetary and fiscal policy in a number of standard dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with nominal price rigidities. While the focus is on Calvo-style nominal price contracts with a range of indexation rules for constrained...

This paper estimates a Bayesian VAR for the US economy which includes a housing sector and addresses the following questions. Can developments in the housing sector be explained on the basis of developments in real and nominal GDP and interest rates? What are the effects of housing demand shocks...

Die deutsche Wirtschaft ist konsumseitig mit Schwung in das Jahr 2015 gestartet. Zahlreiche Faktoren sorgen aktuell für eine sehr gute Konsumstimmung und eine hohe Dynamik beim Privaten Verbrauch: fallende Energiepreise, extrem niedrige Zinsen, die gute Lage auf dem Arbeitsmarkt sowie einmalige...

Policy makers would like to prevent self-fulfilling fluctuations. Given the prevalence of occasionally binding constraints (OBCs) such as the zero lower bound (ZLB), this requires understanding the determinacy of models with OBCs. To this end, we derive existence and uniqueness conditions for...

The federal funds rate became uninformative about the stance of monetary policy from December 2008 to November 2015. During the same period, unconventional monetary policy actions, like large-scale asset purchases, show the Federal Reserve’s intention to depress longer-term interest rates....

We present an incomplete markets model to understand the costs and benefits of increasing government debt in a low interest rate environment. Higher risk increases the demand for safe assets, lowering the natural rate of interest below zero, constraining monetary policy at the zero lower bound,...

Unconventional monetary easing conducted by the Bank of Japan (BOJ) since 2013 has contributed to the yen's depreciation, higher stock prices, and higher corporate profits. Meanwhile, the impacts on aggregate demand and inflation have not been as strong as the BOJ expected while the adverse...

This paper has two aims. First, it provides simple theoretical models that highlight two channels whereby monetary shocks have permanent real effects and the interactions between these channels. Second, it presents an empirical dynamic model, covering a panel of EU countries, and derives the...

This paper shows that the interaction between money growth and staggered nominal contracts gives rise to a long-run inflation-unemployment tradeoff.

Conventional Phillips-curve models that are used to estimate the output gap detect a substantial decline in potential output due to the present crisis. Using a multivariate state space model, we show that this result does not hold if the long run role of excess liquidity (that we estimate...