The economic performances of the Eurozone look weaker than those of the United States over the period 1999-2006, in spite of the fact that the former applies more thoroughly the 'new macroeconomics' governance rules concerning public deficits and inflation control. The literature emphasizes Alan Greenspan's pragmatism when discussing the relative success of the Fed, but the reasons why pragmati...

This paper is a contribution to the literature on the factors behind financial stability, focusing on monetary policy design. In particular, it assesses empirically for a sample of 79 countries in the period 1970 to 2000 whether the choice of the central bank objectives and the monetary policy strategy affect financial stability. We find that focusing the central bank objectives on price stabil...

Disinflationary episodes are a valuable source of information for economic agents trying to learn about the economy. This paper is especially interested in how a policymaker 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 and priva...

The central bank’s monetary policy targets are usually assumed to be constant overtime for simplicity when estimating a Taylor rule, but recent studies have shed some light on the time variation in policy targets, especially in the inflation target. The potential bias due to misspecification of the time variation can be quite considerable, especially in regime-swtiching models. In this paper, w...

This paper proves a certainty equivalence result for optimal policy under commitment with symmetric partial information about the state of the economy in a model with forwardlooking variables. This result is used in our previous paper [9], which synthesizes what is known about the case of symmetric partial information, and derives useful general formulas for computation of the optimal policy re...

Insurance Policies for Monetary Policy in the Euro Area* In this paper, we examine the cost of insurance against model uncertainty for the euro area considering four alternative reference models, all of which are used for policy analysis at the ECB. We find that maximal insurance across this model range in terms of a Minimax policy comes at moderate costs in terms of lower expected performance....

In this study, we perform a quantitative assessment of the role of money as an indicator variable for monetary policy in the euro area. We document the magnitude of revisions to euro area-wide data on output, prices, and money, and find that monetary aggregates have a potentially significant role in providing information about current real output. We then proceed to analyze the information cont...

This paper applies a state-space approach to estimate the implicit inflation target of the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) since the adoption of the Inflation Targeting (IT) framework. The paper‟s findings are two. First, although the official inflation target range is 3–6 percent, in practice, the SARB seems to have aimed for the upper segment of the band (41 2 –6 percent) for most of the p...

Over the past twenty years, macroeconomic performance has improved in industrialized and developing countries alike. In a broad cross-section of countries inflation volatility has fallen markedly while output variability has either fallen or risen only slightly. This increased stability can be attributed to either: 1) more efficient policymaking by the monetary authority, 2) a reduction in the ...

This paper estimates a Structural Dynamic Factor Model on a panel of 102 US quarterly series. We model economic comovements by means of 5 underlying structural shocks (oil price, productivity, aggregate demand, monetary policy, and housing demand). The results of the benchmark model (impulse responses and variance decompositions) are in line with those predicted by economic theory and usually e...