This paper provides an exposition of the nature, means of estimation and uses of Financial Conditions Indexes (FCIs) and their relationship to the more common Monetary Conditions Indexes (MCIs) that are used by market analysts, international organisations and central banks.Using panel datasets...

Using quarterly data for the period since 1987 this paper explores, in the context of a small model of the EU economy, the degree to which monetary policy has been asymmetric.It shows in particular that monetary policy has been much more responsive to threats that inflation would lie outside the...

In the European Economic Area the home country supervises the activities of its banks, wherever they are operating via branches or across borders, while the host country handles the stability of its financial system and problems stemming from failure or distress.We address two main problems...

The aim of the present analysis is to shed light on the question whether Central Banks should publish their macroeconomic forecasts, and what could possibly be gained in monetary policy if they did so.We show that disclosing the Central Bank's assessment of the prevailing inflationary pressures...

We use the ten years of experience in inflation-targeting in New Zealand since 1989 to test whether monetary policy appears to conform to the simple rules that have been recommended for it in the literature.Of the inflation targeting central banks, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand has both the...

The purpose of the paper is to revisit the demand for money specifiections by using U.S. quarterly data over the sample period 1951:1 - 1983:4. Utilizing the so-called threshold models suggested by Tong and Lim (1980) we first demonstrate the unsatisfactory performance of standard linear partial...

This paper reports some policy experiments carried out with the QMED model of the Bank of Finland. The main issue in these experiments is the role of expectations. Thus, we compare a static expectations version with two rational expectations versions of the model. These two versions differ in...

This paper examines the question of whether budget deficits raise nominal interest rates. The empirical analyses make use of cross-country data from 16 countries covering the period 1924 - 1938 .. Contrary to some recent studies (by e.g. Evans), it turns out that budget deficits affect nominal...

This paper examines the determination of interest rates in small open economies. We use the classical interest rate parity relationships as a starting point in developing a test procedure which allows us to evaluate the importance of various domestic shocks (in particular, monetary and fiscal...

This paper presents some analyses of interest rate determination in six industrialized countries during the Great Depression. The main finding of the paper is that the huge real interest rate shocks experienced during that time were mainly due to policy actions by central banks.