This paper investigates the role of bank lending in the monetary transmission process in the Netherlands. We observe significant differences between the responses of corporate and household lending following a monetary shock. We also find that banks hold a buffer stock of securities which they...

This paper investigates asymmetric effects of monetary policy over the business cycle. A two-state Markov Switching Model is employed to model both recessions and expansions. For the United States and Germany, strong evidence is found that monetary policy is more effective in a recession than...

Little attention has been paid in most economic studies on political businesscycles to separate the effects of fiscal and monetary policy. We attempt to as-sess the effect of monetary policy in a panel model for 16 OECD countries.To answer the question whether central banks actively create...

We attempt to assess the effect of monetary policy in a panel model for 16 OECD countries. To answer the question whether central banks actively create political business cycles we focus on the short-term interest rate as a proxy for the use of monetary instruments. Our results indicate that...

Abstract The relevance of public support for monetary policy has largely been overlooked in the empirical central bank literature. We have constructed a new indicator for the support of the German Bundesbank and present descriptive and empirical evidence. We nd that major German interest groups...

This paper combines a new historical data set regarding capital formation in infrastructure in the Netherlands in the nineteenth century with data-oriented econometric techniques aimed at testing the causal relationship between these infrastructural investments and economic growth. The resulting...

The paper considers a (static) portfolio system that satisfies adding-up contraints and the gross substitution theorem. The paper shows the relationship of the two conditions to the weak dominant diagonal property of the matrix of interest rate elasticities. This enables to investigate the...

Abstract In a great majority of countries throughout the world productive government services have declined as percentage of GDP since the 1970s. In the macroeconomic literature this is often associated with the general productivity growth decline, suggesting an important role for infrastructure...

Abstract We analyse whether central bank independence (CBI) affects inflation in developing countries. For this purpose we have constructed a new data set for the turnover rate (TOR) of central bank governors for a very large sample of countries, which also covers the 1990s. We find that once...