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...

We argue that endogenous and anticipated movements in interest rates lead to underestimates of the speed and magnitude of the exchange rate response to monetary policy. Employing the Romer and Romer (2004) exogenous monetary policy shock measure, we find that the effect of a one percentage point...

Much recent monetary policy literature has searched for structural models suitable for policy analysis that are both based on optimising microfoundations and consistent with the data, especially observed persistence in inflation and output. Few models do well on both criteria. We derive an...

Optimal monetary policy is sensitive to the Phillips curve specification used to represent the dynamics of inflation and output. Most recent literature has used a new Keynesian Phillips Curve based on Calvo pricing. This paper shows that this workhorse model is not robust to relatively minor...

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...

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...

This paper considers the costs and benefits of Sweden joining the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU).  We pay particular attention to the costs of abandoning the krona in terms of a loss of monetary policy independence.  For this purpose, we apply a cointegrated VAR framework to...

In this paper, the monetary policy independence of European nations in the years before European Monetary Union (EMU) is investigated using cointegration techniques.  Daily data is used to assess pairwise relationships between individual EMU nations and 'lead' nation Germany, to assess the...

Real-time, quasi-real, `nearly real` and full sample output gaps for the UK, generated by linear and quadratic, Hodrick-Prescott filter and unobserved components (UC-ARIMA) techniques, are presented and analysed. Particular attention is paid to the behaviour of the different series during the...