We develop a theory of money and credit as competing payment instruments, then put it to work in applications. Buyers can use cash or credit, with the former (latter) subject to the inflation tax (transaction costs). Frictions making the choice of payment method interesting also imply equilibrium price dispersion, and together these deliver closed-form solutions for money demand. The model can ...

We study a simple monetary model in which a central bank faces a boundedly rational private sector and has the goal of stabilizing inflation. The system’s dynamics is generated by the interaction of the expectations about inflation of the various agents involved. A modest degree of heterogeneity in such expectations is found to have interesting consequences, in particular when the central bank ...

This paper investigates the predictive ability of financial variables for euro area growth through bivariate and multivariate non-parametric Granger causality tests. Apart from assessing the within-country forecasting ability of commonly-employed financial variables, such as the term spread, the stock market returns and the growth of real money supply, we also test for cross-country influences....

Some Thoughts on Macroeconomic Fluctuations and the Timing of Labor Market Reform In this paper, I analyze the pros and cons of implementing structural reforms of the labor market in booms vs. recessions, in light of considerations of social efficiency, political viability, and macroeconomic fine tuning. While the optimal timing of a reform depends on the relative importance of several conflict...

This paper introduces the concept of the financial possibility frontier as a constrained optimum level of financial development to gauge the relative performance of financial systems across the globe. This frontier takes into account structural country characteristics, institutional, and macroeconomic factors that impact financial system deepening. We operationalize this framework using a bench...

This paper presents a regime-switching model of the yield curve with two states. One is a normal state, the other is a zero-bound state that represents the case when the monetary policy target rate is at its zero lower bound for a prolonged period. The model delivers estimates of the time-varying probability of exiting the zero-bound state, and it outperforms standard threeand four-factor term ...

This study examines the psychological consequences of the introduction of the Euro. People who are not used to the new currency experience higher levels of uncertainty when processing Euro prices and may consequently be more susceptible to biasing influences. We demonstrate that in Winter 2001 – immediately before the introduction of the Euro – German participants were indeed more strongly infl...

This paper studies an advantage of commitment over discretion when a central bank observes only noisy measures of current inflation and output, in the context of an optimizing model with nominal-price stickiness. Under a commitment regime, if current policy turns out to be too expansionary (contractionary) because of the bank’s information problem, subsequent policies should be slightly contrac...

We examine global economic dynamics under infinite-horizon learning in a New Keynesian model in which the interest-rate rule is subject to the zero lower bound. As in Evans, Guse and Honkapohja (2008), we find that under normal monetary and fiscal policy the intended steady state is locally but not globally stable. Unstable deflationary paths can arise after large pessimistic shocks to expectat...