Multinational institutions face an important trade-off when hiring personnel. On the one hand, hiring decisions are based, as in most organizations, on a candidate’s professional qualifications. On the other hand, multinational institutions often aim for broad national representation....

OPTIMThe “conservative central banker” has come under attack recently. Explicitly modeling the interaction of a trade union with monetary policy, it has been argued that the standard solution to the inflationary bias in monetary policy might actually be welfare reducing if the trade union...

Nowadays, it is widely believed that greater disclosure and clarity over policy may lead to greater predictability of central bank actions. We examine whether communication by the European Central Bank (ECB) adds information compared to the information provided by a Taylor rule model in which...

This paper analyses the determinants and effects of ECB interventions in times of severe distress. We focus on the Greek government bond market in mid-2010 and use a unique new dataset to show, for the first time, what type of bonds the ECB bought. We then explore the short-term effects of ECB...

Most theoretical central bank models use short horizons and focus on a single tradeoff. However, in reality central banks play complex, long horizon games and face more than one tradeoff. We account for these issues in a simple infinite horizon game with a novel tradeoff: higher rates deter...

The likely extension of the euro area has triggered a debate on the organization of the ECB, in particular on the apparent mismatch between relative economic size and voting rights in the Council. We present a simple model of optimal representation in a federal central bank addressing this...

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...

The eurozone has a single short-term nominal interest rate, but monetary policy conditions measured by real short-term interest rates varied substantially across countries in the period 2003-2010. We use this cross-country variation in the (local) tightness of monetary policy to examine its...

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...