In this paper we analyse the effect of news relating to the expected path of monetary policy on interest rate futures. Central banks’ transparency is in most respects much greater than it was a decade ago, and so central bank communication needs to be included as a potential source of news. We therefore consider four types of news: macroeconomic news, overseas news, monetary policy surprises an...

Disinflationary episodes are a valuable source of information for economic agents trying to learn about the economy. In this paper we are particularly interested in how policymakers can themselves learn by disinflating. The approach differs from the existing literature, which typically focuses on the learning of private agents during a disinflation. We build a model where both the policymaker a...

This paper confronts exchange rate-trade balance hypotheses derived from the elasticity, absorption/switching and monetary approaches to the balance of payments and short-run disequilibrium effects such as the J and S curves with data from a wide range of developing countries. We find strong evidence that the exchange rate affects the trade balance long-run equilibrium even when money and incom...

Latin American performance during the global fi nancial crisis was unprecedented. Many developing and emerging countries successfully weathered the worst crisis since the Great Depression. Was it good luck? Was it good policies? In this paper we compare growth during the Asian and global fi nancial crises and fi nd that a looser monetary policy played an important role in mitigating crisis. We ...

In this paper we consider a standard policy game between the Government and a union. In such a framework, we first investigate the effects of corporatism on macroeconomic performance vis -à-vis different kinds of non-cooperative equilibria. Afterwards, we introduce in the literature the issue of the feasibility of corporatism, i.e., whether and under what conditions it is in the interest of bot...

We introduce Large Scale Asset Purchases (LSAPs) in a New-Keynesian DSGE model that features distinct mortgage and corporate loan markets. We show that following a significant disruption of financial intermediation, central-bank purchases of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) are uniformly less effective at easing credit market conditions and stabilizing economic activity than outright purchases ...

Yes, it makes a lot of sense. Using the Smets and Wouters (2007) model of the U.S. economy, we find that the role of the output gap should be equal to or even more important than that of annualized inflation when designing a simple loss function to represent household welfare. The high weight on the output gap is driven by several important characteristics in the estimated model, including a lo...

This paper studies the response of the nominal exchange rate to monetary shocks in an economy with consumption home bias (CHB) and sticky wages. The importance of accounting for the exchange rate with CHB are twofold. CHB is a consequence of the small open economy assumption when outputs are specialized and fluctuations in the relative price of traded goods generate deviations from purchasing p...

Article history: Received 8 September 2007 Received in revised form 9 April 2008 Accepted 17 July 2008 Available online 7 August 2008 A random-matching model with a clearinghouse is constructed to investigate the impact of privatemoney on economic efficiency and social welfare in threemonetary regimes. A subset of agents, called bankers, whose credit histories are recorded by the clearinghouse,...

We study the design of optimal monetary policy under uncertainty using a Markov jumplinear-quadratic (MJLQ) approach. We approximating the uncertainty that policymakers face by different discrete modes in a Markov chain, and by taking mode-dependent linear-quadratic approximations of the underlying model. This allows us to apply a powerful methodology with convenient solution algorithms that we...