We explore the use of external instrument SVAR to identify monetary policy shocks. We identify a forward guidance shock as the monetary shock component having zero instant impact on the policy rate. A contractionary forward guidance shock raises both future output and price level, stressing the relative importance of revealing policymakers’ view on future output and price level over committing ...

Why do monetary unions fail? Answers to this question from a material-based approach tend to point to a breakdown in elite political support, especially when actors have material incentives to ‘cheat’ on their multilateral commitments rather than cooperate to overcome the collective action problem that a monetary union entails. Recent ideational approaches have focused on the role of shared eco...

Using a nonlinear structural VAR approach, we estimate the effects of exogenous monetary impulses in the presence of a zero lower bound constraint on nominal interest rates and examine the impact of such a constraint on the effectiveness of counter-cyclical monetary policies. We find that a binding zero bound on nominal interest rates can eliminate more than 50% of the effect of an exogenous mo...

We use a Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm jointly to estimate the parameters of a ‘true’ data generating mechanism and those of a sequence of approximating models that a monetary authority uses to guide its decisions. Gaps between a true expectational Phillips curve and the monetary authority’s approximating non-expectational Phillips curve models unleash inflation that a monetary au...

We examine the impact of different degrees of fiscal feedback on debt in an economy with nominal rigidities where monetary policy is optimal. We look at the extent to which different degrees of fiscal feedback enhances or detracts from the ability of the monetary authorities to stabilise output and inflation. Using an objective function derived from utility, we find the optimal level of fiscal ...

The European Monetary Institute have narrowed down the choice of candidate strategies for a single monetary policy within European Monetary Union to inflation targets or monetary aggregate targets. In practice it is unlikely to be a simple choice between these targets, since all monetary authorities that currently pursue either of these strategies also monitor a wide set of economic and financi...