The central banking literature regards central bank independence and a transparent monetary policy as best suited to achieve and safeguard monetary stability. The existing empirical literature, however, failed in establishing a solid ground for this consensus. This paper sheds some new light on...

Recently, the U. S. subprime crisis has shown that a weak collateralization of credits may have massive economic implications, entailing severe perturbations of the international financial system. We focus on central bank lending and try to pin down the quantitative impact of the...

The current discussion about the future of the financial system draws heavily on a set of theories known as the ‘New Monetary Economics’. The New Monetary Economics predicts that deregulation and financial innovation will lead to a moneyless world. This paper uses a market microstructure...

In Ireland, there was a bank strike that led to a complete shut-down of the main part of the banking system from May to November 1970. The effects of this strike were surprisingly limited. This had led some observers to conclude that trade credit can easily substitute for bank deposits as a...

This paper is the starting point of a series of analyses aiming at re-discovering the role of money for monetary policy purposes. It provides an overview of the role of money in modern macro models. In particular, we are focussing on New Keynesian and New Monetarist models to investigate their...