We develop simple diagrams that can be used by undergraduates to understand interest rate setting by policy-makers. We combine an inflation target, Fisher equation, policy reaction function and short and long run aggregate supply analysis to give a depiction of the policy problem. We illustrate...

Global real interest rates were driven up in the 1980s, partly to encourage disinflation, while subsequently structural and conjunctural factors have driven rates to lower levels. The increase in the global pool of savings and the fiscal correction associated with the long economic expansion...

Price-level determination requires co-ordination of monetary and fiscal policy to ensure a unique rational expectations equilibrium (REE). This paper derives a number of implications for simple interest rate rules resulting from various fiscal strategies. We show that fiscal choices under either...

I outline a simple roadmap for work in micro-founded models. Rather than abandoning the route to further micro-foundations and returning to ad hoc economics, the techniques we have used over the past two decades to develop micro-founded business cycle models will allow us to develop models with...

We re-connect money to inflation using Goodfriend and McCallum's (2007) model where banks supply loans to cash-in-advance constrained consumers on the basis of the value of collateral provided and the monitoring skills of banks. We show that when shocks to monitoring and collateral dominate...

In the canonical monetary policy model, money is endogenous to the optimal path for interest rates and output. But when liquidity provision by banks dominates the demand for transactions money from the real economy, money is likely to contain information for future output and inflation because...

At the zero lower bound, the scale and scope of non-conventional monetary policies have become the key decision variables for monetary policy makers. In the UK, quantitative easing has involved the creation of a fund to purchase medium term dated government bonds with borrowed central bank...

We assess recent developments in monetary policy practice following the financial crisis drawing on papers from a specially convened conference in March 2010. In particular, we consider why central banks throughout the world have injected substantial quantities of liquidity into the financial...

The financial crisis has led to the development of an active debate on the use of macro-prudential instruments for regulating the banking system, in particular for liquidity and capital holdings. Within the context of a micro-founded macroeconomic model, we allow commercial banks to choose their...

Koop, Pesaran and Smith (2011) suggest a simple diagnostic indicator for the Bayesian estimation of the parameters of a DSGE model. They show that, if a parameter is well identified, the precision of the posterior should improve as the (artificial) data size T increases, and the indicator checks...