Elmar Mertens is a senior economist at the Research Centre of the Deutsche Bundesbank in Frankfurt, Germany. Prior to joining the Bundesbank in 2018, he has worked for a year at the Bank for International Settlements (Basel, Switzerland) and eight years at the Federal Reserve Board (Washington, D.C.). At the Federal Reserve, he was involved in devising policy alternatives and their communication as well as the empirical analysis of economic conditions. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking.
A common theme of his research is the interplay between macroeconomic dynamics and the formation of expectations. His econometric research is often concerned with time-varying dynamics, for example due to time-varying volatilities, changes in the behaviour of trends and cycles, or the effective lower bound on nominal interest rates.