An empirical comparison of Bundesbank and ECB monetary policy rules

Jon Faust (), John Rogers and Jonathan Wright

No 705, International Finance Discussion Papers from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.)

Abstract: We estimate a monetary policy reaction function for the Bundesbank and use it as a benchmark to assess the monetary policy of the ECB since the launch of the euro in January 1999. We find that euro interest rates are low relative to this benchmark. We consider several possible reasons for this, including the divergence between core and headline inflation, inflation having turned out to be higher than could have been foreseen by the ECB and the possibility that the ECB is focussing only on macroeconomic conditions in a subset of member countries. We argue that these potential explanations cannot account for the difference between recent interest rates and our estimated Bundesbank benchmark. Our results suggest that the reaction function of the ECB features a high weight on the output gap relative to the weight on inflation, compared to the Bundesbank.

Keywords: European Central Bank; Monetary policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec and nep-mon
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