This paper investigates the impact of exchange rate movements on the conduct of monetary policy in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. We develop and estimate a structural general equilibrium two-sector model with sticky prices and wages and limited exchange rate pass-through....

We use daily transactional ledger data from the Bank of England's Archive to test whether and to what extent the Bank of England during the mid-nineteenth century adhered to Walter Bagehot's rule that a central bank in a financial crisis should lend cash freely at a penalty rate in exchange for...

It is well known that quantitative credit restrictions, rather than Bagehot-style ‘free lending' constituted the standard response to financial crises in the early days of central banking. But why did central banks in the past frequently restrict the supply of loans during financial crises? In...

This paper contains the first detailed empirical examination of the information content of the Bank of England Credit Conditions Survey (CCS). The CCS asks a wide selection of questions of UK lenders relating to all aspects of bank credit provision. We examine the association between the survey...

We ask how central banks can change their communication in order to receive greater newspaper coverage. We write down a model of news production and consumption in which news generation is endogenous because the central bank must draft its communication in such a way that newspapers choose to...

Differences of opinion are a natural and vital part of monetary policy making by committee. With the appropriate stance for monetary policy both unobservable and uncertain, individual policymakers need to synthesise a wide range of information, including the views of other committee members....

We study the characteristics of inflation targeting as a shock absorber, using quarterly data for a large panel of countries. To overcome an endogeneity problem between monetary regimes and the likelihood of crises, we propose to study large natural disasters. We find that inflation targeting...

Recent events in financial markets have underlined the importance of analyzing the link between the financial health of banks and real economic activity. This paper contributes to this analysis by constructing a dynamic general equilibrium model in which the balance sheet of banks affects the...

Although the concept of monetary policy lag has historical roots deep in the monetary economics literature, relatively little attention has been paid to the idea. In this paper, we build on Svensson's (1997) inflation targeting framework by explicitly taking into account the lagged effect of...

A number of central banks publish their own business conditions survey based on non-random sampling methods. The results of these surveys influence monetary policy decisions and thus affect expectations in financial markets. To date, however, no one has computed the statistical accuracy of these...