Central banks have been considering the introduction of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). The theoretical literature indicates that this may influence private banks' lending activity and their profitability with implications for financial stability. To provide empirical evidence on this...

Gesell taxes on money holdings have received attention in recent decades as a way of alleviating the zero lower bound on interest rates. Less known is that such a tax was the predominant method used to generate seigniorage in large parts of medieval Europe for around two centuries. When the...

This paper discusses how price stability can be defined and how price stability can be maintained in practice. Some lessons for the Eurosystem are also considered. With regard to defining price stability, the choice between price-level stability and low (including zero) inflation and the...

The use of explicit inflation targets has meant that monetary policy has become more transparent and also easier to evaluate. The analysis in this paper is based on forecasts by Sveriges Riksbank (the central bank of Sweden) on real output and inflation. Our purpose is to separate the effects on...

Using a small empirical model of inflation, output, and money estimated on U.S. data, we compare the relative performance of monetary targeting and inflation targeting. The results show that monetary targeting would be quite inefficient, with both higher inflation and output variability. This is...

The purpose of the paper is to survey and discuss ination targeting in the context of monetary policy rules. The paper provides a general conceptual discussion of monetary policy rules, attempts to clarify the essential characteristics of ination targeting, compares ination targeting to other...

In light of the current low-interest-rate environment, we reconsider the merit of a money growth target (MGT) relative to a conventional in‡ation targeting (IT) regime, and to the notion of price level targeting (PLT). Through the lens of a New Keynesian model, and accounting for a zero lower...

This paper discusses how monetary policy in Sweden has evolved since 1973. We provide a chronology of the different monetary policy regimes in place during the past fifty years and identify two main regimes, the pegged-but-adjustable exchange rate regime (1973 - 1992) and the inflation targeting...

To shed light on the interaction between macroprudential and monetary policies, we study the inward transmission of foreign monetary policy in conjunction with domestic macroprudential and monetary policies in Norway and Sweden. Using detailed bank-level data we show how Norwegian and Swedish...

We use an 'unexplained demand for cash' approach to measure the size of the shadow economy in Sweden. The size of the shadow economy is found to have increased from 3.8 to 6.5 per cent of GDP from 1990 to 2004. This result is also supported by our finding of an increased residual between...