The European Central Bank (ECB) is a special, even unique central bank. It is a central bank without a treasury by its side or a state behind it, just as the euro, Europe's common currency that the ECB is tasked with guarding, is a 'denationalised' currency. The euro area is a rare exception to...

This paper estimates the path of inflation persistence in the United States over the last 50 years and draws implications about the evolution of the Federal Reserve's monetary-policy preferences. Standard models of central bank optimization predict that the central bank's preference for output...

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of delegation in solving the time inconsistency problem of monetary policy using a microfounded general equilibrium model where delegation and reappointment are explicitly included into the government's strategy. The method of Chari and Kehoe (1990) is...

This paper examines the emerging challenges to the art of monetary policymaking using the case study of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in light of developments in the Indian economy during the last decade (2003-04 to 2013-14). The paper uses Hyman P. Minsky's financial instability hypothesis as...

From 2000 to 2003, when Ben Bernanke was a professor and then a Fed Governor, he wrote extensively about monetary policy at the zero bound on interest rates. He advocated aggressive stimulus policies, such as a money-financed tax cut and an inflation target of 3-4%. Yet, since U.S. interest...

In this paper we survey the development of lending of last resort operations in the mid-19th century. We identify and document critical dimensions of the extension of lending of last resort functions, and also develop original empirical tests enabling us to identify such things as the emergence...

This paper analyzes whether the Lender of Last Resort function has changed in consequence of the recent Global Financial Crisis. The unprecedented emergency actions of the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank and the Bank of England are analyzed in terms of Walter Bagehot's traditional Lender...

This paper explains the emergence of liquidity traps in the aftermath of large-scale financial crises, as happened in the US 1930s, Japan 1990s and recently in the US and Europe. The paper introduces a new balance sheet channel that links equity capital to the risk-free interest rate. When...

We use a quantitative equilibrium model with houses, collateralized debt and foreign borrowing to study the impact of global imbalances on the U.S. economy in the 2000s. Our results suggest that the dynamics of foreign capital flows account for between one fourth and one third of the increase in...

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how the change in actual and potential market risks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) during the two-year period 2007-2008 can be analyzed with the help of-analysis. In the empirical analysis, the average of the Lyapunov exponents for the dynamic...