Aspects of Central Bank Policy Making

This volume is a collection of papers which were presented and discussed at a conference in January 1990 at the Bank of Israel and Tel Aviv University. The volume has three parts. The first part deals with the rules and the constraints that are fundamental for central bank policy making. It starts with a critical review of 75 years of monetary policy of the US Federal Reserve Bank (A. Meltzer), followed by several studies directed at the issues concerning the establishment of a European Central Bank (T. Padoa-Schioppa, A. Drazen, H. Bockelmann, A. Cukierman, E. Helpman and L. Leiderman). The second part deals with insurance, regulation and safety of commercial banks (B. Bental, Z. Eckstein and D. Peled; J.H. Boyd and A.J. Rolnick). The last part contains analyses of monetary policies in Germany (H.-J. Dudler) and Israel (L. Meridor and S. Pessach; A. Razin and E. Sadka; A. Offenbacher). Part of the research included in this volume is the result of a two-year research project on "Central Bank Policies, Desinflation and the Macroeconomy" conducted at the D. Horowitz Institute. The contributors to this project were: the Bundesbank, the Bank of England, the Bank of Italy, the Bank of Israel, the Bank for International Settlements and the Bank of The Netherlands