Central banks have evolved for close to four centuries. This paper argues that for two centuries central banks caught up to the strategies followed by the leading central banks of the era; the Bank of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the Federal Reserve in the twentieth...

Fabian Schnell develops a model indicating that by keeping real interest rates too low, monetary policy can distort the allocation of resources across firms and potentially delay economic recovery after a recession. This is a new channel of monetary policy that is especially relevant in view of...

In this paper we provide empirical measures of central bank credibility and augment these with historical narratives from eleven countries. To the extent we are able to apply reliable institutional information we can also indirectly assess their role in influencing the credibility of the...

This paper examines the historical evolution of central bank credibility using both historical narrative and empirics for a group of 16 countries, both advanced and emerging. It shows how the evolution of credibility has gone through a pendulum where credibility was high under the classical gold...

Lukas Heim evaluates the performance of a price-level targeting rule compared to that of a standard inflation targeting rule. The comparison is based on a medium-scale DSGE model which has been estimated based on state-of-the-art Bayesian methods. The model for the Swiss economy is an expanded...

This essay aims to explain the nature of monetary and fiscal policy interactions and how those interactions could inform the fiscal rules that countries choose to follow. It makes two points: (1) monetary policy control of inflation requires appropriate fiscal backing; (2) European fiscal...