Commonly used instruments for the identification of monetary policy disturbances are likely to combine true shock with information about state economy due disclosed through action. We show that this signaling effect can give rise empirical puzzles reported in literature, and propose a new high-frequency instrument shocks accounts informational rigidities. find tightening is unequivocally contra...

We revisit the usefulness of long-run money demand equations for the European Central Bank. We first conduct a model evaluation exercise by means of a recent time–varying cointegration test. A stable relation for euro area M3 is not rejected by data only when accounting for both a speculative motive, represented by international financial markets, and a precautionary motive, proxied by changes ...

We use Bayesian time-varying parameters VARs with stochastic volatility to investigate changes in the marginal predictive content of the yield spread for output growth in the United States and the United Kingdom, since the Gold Standard era, and in the Eurozone, Canada, and Australia over the post-WWII period. Overall, our evidence does not provide much support for either of the two dominant ex...

We developed a simple monetary model to study the effects of tax evasion on the optimal inflation tax. The model is constructed so that inflation might be an indirect way of taxing the underground sector of the economy. We show that while there are theoretical reasons for positive optimal inflation rates, the effects are quantitatively small, even in countries with large underground sectors. We...

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....