This brief exposition suggests that the Federal Reserve System temporarily guarantee a lower bound on stock prices in order to escape the current combination of liquidity trap and credit crunch. It shortly discusses reasons for this measure, consequences, and some alternatives. It is meant as a...

Monetary policy is the process by which the central bank of a country controls the supply of money, the availability of money, and the cost of money or rate of interest, in order to attain a set of objectives oriented towards the growth and stability of the economy. Fiscal policy induced demand...

This paper empirically studies the impact of the quality of political institutions on the link between central bank independence and inflation. Making use of data on the evolution of central bank independence over time and controlling for possible nonlinearities, we employ interaction models to...

Many central banks have become more transparent during the last decade, in particular about macroeconomic prospects. This paper shows that such economic transparency could give central banks greater flexibility to respond to macroeconomic shocks. In particular, it allows central banks to...

Using voting data from the Bank of England, we show that different individual assessments of the economy strongly influence votes after controlling for individual policy preferences. We estimate that internal members form more precise assessments than externals and are also more hawkish, though...

In a VAR model of the US, the response of the relative price of durables to a monetary contraction is either flat or mildly positive. It significantly falls only if narrowly defined as the ratio between new house and nondurables prices. These findings survive three identification strategies and...

This paper sets up a canonical new Keynesian small open economy model with nominal price rigidities to explore the impact of habit persistence and exchange rate pass-through on the welfare ranking of alternative monetary policy rules. It identifies three factors that can affect the welfare...

This paper sets up a canonical new Keynesian small open economy model with nominal price rigidities to explore the impact of habit persistence and exchange rate pass-through on the welfare ranking of alternative monetary policy rules. It identifies three factors that can affect the welfare...

This paper analyzes the role and scope of macroprudential policy in preventing financial instability in the context of East Asian economies. It analyzes the behavior of the housing market in a dynamic setting to identify some of the factors responsible for the volatility of housing markets and...

This paper analyzes the role and scope of macroprudential policy in preventing financial instability in the context of East Asian economies. It analyzes the behavior of the housing market in a dynamic setting to identify some of the factors responsible for the volatility of housing markets and...