The debate about Canadian-U.S. monetary integration is surveyed. The choice is among overall monetary orders,rather than exchange rate regimes and questions of policy credibility and political accountability are crucial. Canada’s recent economic performance under inflation targets, and...

There has been a remarkable rise in the transparency of monetary policy during the last two decades. This paper provides an overview of the ways in which central banks have been providing more information about their monetary policymaking. Furthermore, it reviews the theoretical literature on...

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...

Recent theoretical research suggests that financing sub-national governments’ expenditure out of own revenue sources is linked to more responsible budgeting, because the financial implications of spending decisions then are internalized within a jurisdiction. We test this proposition...

We present a simple neoclassical model to explore how an aggregate bank-capital requirement can be used as a macroeconomic policy tool and how this additional tool interacts with monetary policy. Aggregate bank-capital requirements should be adjusted when the economy is hit by cost-push shocks...

Theory and evidence suggest that in an environment of well-anchored expectations, temporary news or shocks to economic variables, should not affect agents’ expectations of inflation in the long term. Our estimated structural VARs show that both long- and short-term inflation expectations are...

This paper looks at how the reputation of a monetary policy making committee is jointly determined with the reputations of its individual members. I ask whether individuals ha ve more or less incentive to gain a reputation for being tough on inflation when they are part of a group. I examine the...

The rules laid down in Article 32 of the Protocol No. 18 on the Statute of the European System of Central Banks and of the European Central Bank of the Maastricht Treaty will significantly redistribute European seignorage income and hence the implicit entitlement to the € 352 billion stock of...