This paper – which takes into consideration overall experience with the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) as well improvements made to this measure inflation since 2003 finds that HICP continues fulfil prerequisites for index underlying ECB’s definition price stability. Nonetheless, there is scope enhancing HICP, especially by including owner-occupied housing (OOH) using net acquisitio...

A wrong model can lead to a wrong conclusion. The failure to capture inflation dynamics has made the standard New Keynesian framework of monetary policy analysis prone to such a critique. In this paper, we investigate optimal monetary policy using a model that can capture the observed inflation persistence. The model, which we call the dual stickiness model, integrates sticky prices and sticky ...

Inflation Adjustment and Labour Market Structures: Evidence from a Multi-Country Study An empirical analysis of the impact of labour market structures on the response of inflation to macroeconomic shocks is presented. Results based on a 20 country panel show that if labour market coordination is high, the effect on inflation of movements in unemployment, import prices, tax rates and productivit...

Quantification techniques are popular methods in empirical research for aggregating the qualitative predictions at the microlevel into a single figure. In this paper, we analyze the forecasting performance of various methods that are based on the qualitative predictions of financial experts for major financial variables and macroeconomic aggregates. Based on the Centre of European Economic Rese...

We use noncausal autoregressions to examine the persistence properties of quarterly U.S. consumer price inflation from 1970:1—2012:2. These nonlinear models capture the autocorrelation structure of the inflation series as accurately as their conventional causal counterparts, but they allow for persistence to depend on the size and sign of shocks to inflation as well as the inflation rate. Infla...

Article history: Received 17 September 2014 Received in revised form 23 March 2015 Accepted 24 March 2015 Available online 31 March 2015 This paper investigates the dynamic effects of common macroeconomic shocks in shaping business cycle fluctuations in a group of Euro-area countries. In particular, by using the structural (near) VAR methodology, we investigate the effect of area-wide shocks, w...

We propose an Economic Stability Index (ESI) incorporating house prices and stock prices as components of the measure of the inflation rate in order to allow the European Central Bank (ECB) to achieve both price and macroeconomic stability. We use an optimisation approach to estimate target weights for different sectoral prices in the broader price index, which depend on sectoral parameters oth...

Forecasting Economic Aggregates by Disaggregates* We explore whether forecasting an aggregate variable using information on its disaggregate components can improve the prediction mean squared error over first forecasting the disaggregates and then aggregating those forecasts, or, alternatively, over using only lagged aggregate information in forecasting the aggregate. We show theoretically that...

Once the zero bound on nominal interest rates is taken into account, Taylor-type interest-rate feedback rules give rise to unintended self-fulfilling decelerating inflation paths and aggregate fluctuations driven by arbitrary revisions in expectations. These undesirable equilibria exhibit the essential features of liquidity traps, as monetary policy is ineffective in bringing about the governme...

This paper presents a number of responses to Gordon de Brouwer’s criticisms of my paper on monetary policy in Indonesia. Among other things, it argues that de Brouwer has failed to disentangle the impact of two exogenous disturbances on prices—and relative prices—during the crisis and post-crisis period. These disturbances were capital flight, which resulted in real depreciation of the rupiah, ...