E52

I estimate the dynamic effects of respectively traditional interest rate
innovations and unconventional monetary policy actions on the Euro area
economy. The results show that the Eurosystem can stimulate the economy
beyond the policy rate by increasing the size of its balance sheet. The ultimate
consequences on output and consumer prices are however more sluggish

Psychological factors, market sentiments, and shifts in beliefs are believed by many to play a nontrivial role in inducing and amplifying economic fluctuations. Yet, these forces are rarely considered in macroeconomic models. This paper provides an attempt to evaluate the empirical role of expectational shocks on business cycle fluctuations.

We defend the forecasting performance of the FOMC from the recent criticism of Christina and David Romer. Our argument is that the FOMC forecasts a
worst-case scenario that it uses to design decisions that will work well enough (are robust) despite possible misspecification of its model. Because these

A canonical model is described which reflects the real-time informational context of decision-making. Comparisons are drawn with ‘conventional’ models that incorrectly omit market-informed insights on future macroeconomic conditions and inappropriately incorporate information that was not available at the time.

This paper formalizes the process of updating the nowcast and forecast on output and inflation as new releases of data become available. The marginal contribution of a particular release for the value of the signal and its precision is evaluated by computing 'news' on the basis of an evolving conditioning information set.

Several industrialised countries have had a similar inflation experience in the past 30 years, with inflation high and volatile in the 1970s and the 1980s but low and stable in the most recent period. We explore the dynamics of inflation in these countries via a time-varying factor model.

We estimate the approximate nonlinear solution of a small DSGE model on euro area data, using the conditional particle filter to compute the model likelihood. Our results are consistent with previous findings, based on simulated data, suggesting that this approach delivers sharper inference compared to the estimation of the linearised model.

Central bankers frequently emphasize the critical importance of anchoring private inflation expectations for successful monetary policy and macroeconomic stabilization. In most monetary policy models, however, expectations are already anchored through the assumption of rational expectations and perfect knowledge of the economy.

This Paper studies empirically the transmission mechanism of European monetary policy by means of time-varying, heterogenous coefficient models estimated in a numerical Bayesian fashion.