Since the dismantling of the Bretton Woods system, gold has delivered average return comparable to the average return delivered by the aggregate US stock market. This suggests that none of the growth and technological improvement gains accrued to the financiers. In the context of modern asset...

In this paper I add to the evidence on possible nonlinearities in the conduct of ECB monetary policy. For this purpose a nonlinear Taylor rule (threshold regression) was estimated and compared to a linear benchmark model. The estimation was carried out with output gap data computed from...

The policy of inflation targeting is a monetary regime which seeks inflation. His practice was marked by a high stability observed. A debate emerged on the effectiveness and economic performance of this regime. Many searches are interested in this issue without being able to even reach an...

We propose an indicator of the degree of conservativeness of an independent central bank and we derive its optimal social value. We show that from a normative perspective, one can either design a central bank that cares about public spending or that it does not -but in the latter case the...

Monetary policy design in currency unions faces more challenging scenarios like the presence of asymmetric shocks and the higher probability of time inconsistency. An evaluation of the union welfare under a monetary rule and under discretion in these circumstances is carried out. Assuming that...

In this paper, we extend the work of Hamori (2008) to include three main innovations: (i) we consider an open economy version of money demand which is more representative for small open economies like those in SSA; (ii) we consider both the homogenous and heterogeneous panel cointegration methods...

We analyse the optimal composition of a committee comprising members that have private information and represent constituencies of different economic sizes. ‘Proportional representation' - i.e. each constituency represented proportionally to its economic weight - seems intuitively...

This paper examines the linear and nonlinear causal relationships between commodity price indices and macroeconomic variables such as the consumer price index (CPI) and the industrial production index (IP) in the Euro zone. We use monthly time series data from January 1999 to December 2011 and...

Despite widespread recognition that credibility is an important determinant of inflation persistence, surprisingly little empirical evidence exists to support this hypothesis. We investigate this hypothesis using data for US and UK. Our results suggest that the degree of inflation persistence is...

This paper investigates the design of optimal monetary policy in a currency union with asymmetric national labor markets. For this purpose a stylized theoretical two-country model is introduced where the occurrence of inflation differentials is a reflection of asymmetries in the labor market...