A literature has grown up around papers by Kydland and Prescott (1977) and Barro and Gordon (1983) which shows how governments have an incentive to inflate the economy (to generate extra output) then the private sector will anticipate this and the economy will stick at a high inflation...

In this paper a version of the rational expectations hypothesis is tested using fixed-event inflation forecasts for the UK. Fixed-event forecasts consist of a panel of forecasts for a set of outturns of a series at varying horizons prior to each outturn. The forecasts are the prediction of fund...

This paper addresses the question of whether there is downward rigidity in money wages and prices. It is an issue that is relevant to the choice of the level of the inflation target, as it has been argued that targeting too low a level of inflation will be harmful when downward rigidities exist....

This paper reports the main results of a survey carried out by the Bank in the autumn of 1995 of the price-setting behaviour of 654 UK companies. It elaborates on an article in the May 1996 Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin. In the year preceding the survey, the average company reviewed its...

This paper looks at disaggregated price data in the UK to see if there is evidence of downward nominal rigidity: are prices less likely to fall after a downward shock than they are to rise after an upward shock? The test is to see if, as the mean inflation rate falls, the skewness, or the...

Using post-war data on 43 countries, this paper shows that the finding that the trade-off between inflation and output falls as inflation rises is quite robust. The implication is that the real effects of monetary policy might be greater as the economy moves towards price stability. The paper...

This paper tests for unbiasedness in inflation expectations drawn from a survey of UK employees by Gallup. It focuses on the econometric difficulties presented by having a small sample, there being overlapping forecast horizons and by trying to make inference when the data appear to be...

The previous literature on the benefits of price level versus inflation targeting has, with some qualifications, established that price level targeting entails lower price level variance at the expense of higher inflation and output variance. This paper investigates the properties of monetary...