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Conference Paper
Achieving growth amid fiscal imbalances: the real effects of debt
Working Paper
Imperfect information and staggered price setting
Journal Article
Legal structure, financial structure, and the monetary policy transmission mechanism
Among the many challenges facing the new Eurosystem - the European Central Bank and the central banks of the eleven members of the European Monetary Union - is the possibility that participating countries will respond differently to interest rate changes. This paper provides evidence that differences in financial structure are the proximate cause for these national asymmetries in monetary policy transmission and that these differences in financial structure are a result of differences in legal structure. The author concludes that unless legal structures are harmonized across Europe, the ...
Journal Article
High real interest rates: can they be explained?
Journal Article
Practical issues in monetary policy targeting
An outline of the considerable information requirements faced by monetary policymakers, and an examination of the data to see what we actually know and how well we know it. The author's primary conclusion is that the deficiencies of our forecasting ability create uncertainty that leads to cautious policymaking.
Journal Article
The consumer price index as a measure of inflation
An estimation of a price index that is immune to some of the weighting biases that can hinder the use of the Consumer Price Index as a reliable measure of inflation.
Working Paper
Inflation targeting and private sector forecasts
Transparency is one of the biggest innovations in central bank policy of the past quarter century. Modern central bankers believe that they should be as clear about their objectives and actions as possible. However, is greater transparency always beneficial? Recent work suggests that when private agents have diverse sources of information, public information can cause them to overreact to the signals from the central bank, leading the economy to be too sensitive to common forecast errors. Greater transparency could be destabilizing. While this theoretical result has clear intuitive appeal, it ...
Working Paper
Monitoring core inflation
An analysis of the use of limited-information estimators as measures of core inflation, showing that these estimators, such as the median of the cross-sectional distribution of inflation, have a higher correlation with past money growth and deliver improved forecasts of future inflation relative to the Consumer Price Index.
Journal Article
The seasonality of consumer prices
A reevaluation of the evidence of seasonality in prices, finding that seasonal price movements have become more prominent in the relatively stable inflation environment that has prevailed since 1982, and that the amount of seasonality differs greatly by item, making it difficult to generalize about seasonal price movements.