Selected Topics from Monetary Economics

The dissertation contains four individual articles, with inflation being a common topic.

In the first article we learn that globalisation may lead to more temporary deviations from inflation targets but by itself ultimately does not call into question central banks’ control of the price level.

The second article takes a look at policy options when the central bank is constrained by the effective lower bound on interest rates but would still like to set additional expansionary impulses. Here we find that the effectiveness and efficiency of unconventional tools may be limited outside acute crises.

The third article asks for the reasons that lead to central banks finding themselves at this lower bound. It argues that decade-long trends (e.g. in productivity or demographics), rather than acute developments connected to the global financial crisis, are the primary culprits.

Finally, the fourth article argues that labour cost developments, which are widely used to forecast price inflation, actually are not a good predictor of price movements at typical forecast horizons.