There is widespread disagreement about the role of housing wealth in explaining consumption.  This paper exploits liquid and illiquid wealth time series from household balance sheet data for South Africa, previously constructed by the authors, to explain fluctuations in the ratios of...

Disinflationary episodes are a valuable source of information for economic agents trying to learn about the economy.  This paper is especially interested in how a policymaker can themselves learn by disinflating.  The approach differs from the existing literature, which typically focuses on...

In an economy with a fixed exchange rate regime that suffers a random adverse shock, we study the strategies of imperfectly and sequentially informed speculators that may trigger an endogenous devaluation before it occurs exogenously. The game played by the speculators has a unique symmetric...

This paper incorporates limited asset markets participation in dynamic general equilibrium and develops a simple analytical framework for monetary policy analysis. Aggregate dynamics and stability properties of an otherwise standard business cycle model depend nonlinearly on the degree of asset...

In a monetary policy model incorporating partial persistence in inflation it is shown that inflation bias is reduced and the response to shocks improved if the policy maker has a discount rate lower than its true social value. Thus a patient central banker is shown to be a third mechanism for...

I describe a new static (sealed-bid) auction for multiple substitute goods.  As in a two-sided simultaneous multiple round auction (SMRA), bidders bid on multiple assets simultaneously, and bid-takers choose supply functions across assets.  The auction yields more efficiency, revenue,...

In response to the Great Financial Crisis, the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and many other central banks have adopted unconventional monetary policy instruments.  We investigate if one of these, purchases of long-term government debt, could be a valuable addition to conventional...

Inflation targeting central banks will be hampered without good models to assist them to be forward-looking.  Many current inflation models fail to forecast turning points adequately, because they miss key underlying long-run influences.  The world is on the cusp of a dramatic turning point in...

We analyse the costs of a monetary union in West Africa by means of asymmetric aggegate demand and aggregate supply shocks. Previous studies have estimated the shocks with the VAR model. We discuss the limits of this approach and apply a new technique based on the dynamic factor model. The...

Measures of central banks` independence and central banks` accountability which are based on an interpretation of their statutes provide, in themselves, no guidance for the assessment of legislative proposals. In the effectiveness of monetary policy, the crucial considerations relate to how...