The paper surveys the recent literature on the fiscal implications of central bank balance sheets, with a special focus on political economy issues. It then presents the results of simulations that describe the effects of different scenarios for the Federal Reserve's longer-run balance sheet on...

The paper develops a communication game that is applied to the question of central bank policy and independence. The game is about the preferred degree of conservatism of monetary policy and the game setting consists of a principal (politics), an agent (central bank) and an observer (financial...

In the 1990s, the empirical relation between money demand and interest rates began to fall apart. We analyze to what extent improved access to money markets can explain this break-down. For this purpose, we construct a microfounded monetary model with a money market, which provides insurance...

An increasing number of central banks implement monetary policy via a channel system or a floor system. We construct a general equilibrium model to study the properties of these systems. We find that the optimal framework is a floor system if and only if the target rate satisfies the Friedman...

Do financial market participants free-ride on liquidity? To address this question, we construct a dynamic general equilibrium model where agents face idiosyncratic preference and technology shocks. A secondary financial market allows agents to adjust their portfolio of liquid and illiquid assets...

While both public and private financial agencies supply asset markets with large quantities of information, they do not necessarily disclose all asset-related information to the general public. This observation leads us to ask what principles might govern the optimal disclosure policy for an...

Can there be too much trading in financial markets? To address this question, we construct a dynamic general equilibrium model, where agents face idiosyncratic preference and technology shocks. A financial market allows agents to adjust their portfolio of liquid and illiquid assets in response...

This introductory essay briefly summarizes the eleven empirical studies of price setting and price adjustment that are included in this special issue. The studies, which use data from several European countries, were conducted as part of the European Central Bank's Inflation Persistence Network.

This paper studies the relationship between the hazard rate of the exit of a president of a central bank and a measure of credibility in monetary policy. The expected hazard rate of exit is estimated as a function of legal and political variables. The measure of credibility is the expected...

After World War II and prior to the financial deregulation of the 1980s, monetary policy in Sweden as well as in other western European countries rested chiefly on a system of far-reaching non-market-oriented controls of credit flows and interest rates. How was monetary policy conducted in such...