I develop and estimate a monetary business cycle model with nominal loans and collateral constraints tied to housing values. Demand shocks move housing and nominal prices in the same direction, and are amplified and propagated over time. The financial accelerator is not uniform: nominal debt dampens supply shocks, stabilizing the economy under interest rate control. Structural estimation suppor...

UNLABELLED The objective of this paper is to verify the hypotheses presented in the literature on the causal relationship between inflation and its uncertainty, for the newest EU countries. To ensure the robustness of the results, in the study four models for inflation uncertainty are estimated in parallel: ARCH (1), GARCH (1,1), EGARCH (1,1,1) and PARCH (1,1,1). The Granger method is used to t...

The hoped-for silver lining of euro-area austerity programs was to raise external competitiveness and improve current accounts. Using product- industry-level data for 12 countries over the period 1999–2018, we show that reductions in government spending reduce prices wages but only products with low import content industries export shares. This leads asymmetric expenditure switching, net export...

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...

This paper analyzes some new tests of the Cagan hyperinflation–money demand model which have several advantages relative to those in the literature. They do not confound specification error with rational bubbles, can be implemented with a linear procedure, and are frequently able to detect periodically collapsing bubbles which have challenged existing tests. After a Monte Carlo analysis, the te...

This paper uses the European Commission’s Consumer Survey to assess whether inflation expectations have converged and whether inflation uncertainty has diminished following the introduction of the Euro in Europe. Consumers’ responses to the survey suggest that inflation expectations depend more on past national inflation rates than on the ECB’s anchor for price stability. The convergence in inf...

This paper describes the chaotic monetary environment of medieval and early modern Europe. The poor quality of the coinage was a result both of problems with the supply of bullion and with deficiencies of monetary policy. The paper examines the supply and demand of bullion and the determinants of bullion flows. It then discusses the economics and politics of debasement. It concludes with a desc...

This paper uses over two years of weekly scanner data from two small US cities to characterize time and state dependence of grocers’ pricing decisions. In these data, the probability of a nominal adjustment declines with the time since the last price change even after controlling for heterogeneity across store-product cells and replacing sale prices with regular prices. We also detect state dep...

——————————————————————————————————— We develop a model where agents can allocate their wealth between a liquid asset, which can be used to purchase consumption goods, and an illiquid asset, which represents a better store of value. Should a consumption opportunity arise, agents may visit a frictional “over-the-counter” secondary asset market where they can exchange illiquid for liquid assets. W...

A number of recent studies examining historical experiences with deflation have called into question the widely-held view that maintains deflation is economically harmful. These studies contend that a broad, historical perspective reveals a more nuanced view of deflation, one that requires taking seriously both malign and benign deflation. This paper builds on these findings by taking an in-dep...