Due to their functionality, stored value purses based on smart card technology are prominent candidates for being the dominant medium of exchange for micropayments. However, the overall prospects of these payment systems are yet ambiguous, both from the perspective of practice and monetary...

The demand for money, especially in the developing countries, is an important relationship for formulating appropriate monetary policy and targeting monetary variables. In this paper we estimate the demand for narrow money in India and evaluate its robustness. It is found that there is a stable...

The “neoclassical synthesis” sticky price model exhibits strange behavior when augmented with markets for durable goods with flexible prices. While in the data the output of durable goods responds strongly and positively to a loosening of monetary policy, in dynamic general equilibrium...

What is the optimum quantity of money in a society? This paper answers this question both from the perspective of a utility maximizing model with real balances in the utility function, and employing an inventory theoretic model which focuses attention on the costs of transacting in different...

Macroeconomic Policies of the Economic and Monetary Union: Theoretical Underpinnings and Challenges Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer, The Levy Economics Institute and Leeds University Abstract This paper presents two issues: first, an effort to decipher the type of economic analysis and...

This paper examines the optimal frequency of monetary policy meetings when their schedule is pre-announced. Our contribution is twofold. First, we show that in the standard New Keynesian framework infrequent but periodic revision of monetary policy may be desirable even when there are no...

This paper considers the position of national central banks within the ESCB. The funda-mental framework underlying the ESCB is that of a system of central banks in which component institutions are individually and collectively responsible for carrying out vari-ous tasks. Within this framework,...

Factor-augmented VARs (FAVARs) have combined standard VARs with factor analysis to exploit large data sets in the study of monetary policy. FAVARs enjoy a number of advantages over VARs: they allow a better identification of the monetary policy shock; they can avoid the use of a single variable...