This paper provides empirical evidence in favor of the hypothesis thatthe secular price increase in the 16th century is mainly caused by money supplydevelopments as the discovery of new mines in Latin America. First we reviewprice developments for several European countries over the 16th century...

Monetary policy has traditionally been viewed as theprocess by which a central bank uses its influence overthe supply of money to promote its economic objectives. Forexample, Milton Friedman (1959, p. 24) defined the tools ofmonetary policy to be those “powers that enable the [FederalReserve]...

In practice, central banks have been confronted with a trade-off between stabilising inflation and output when dealing with rising oil prices. This contrasts with the result in the standard New Keynesian model that ensuring complete price stability is the optimal thing to do, even when an oil...

Many developing and emerging markets have high degrees of state bank ownership. In addition, therecent global financial crisis has led to significant state ownership of banking assets in developedcountries such as the United Kingdom. These observations beg the question of whether...

While consumption habits have been utilised as a means of generating a hump shapedoutput response to monetary policy shocks in sticky-price New Keynesian economies,there is relatively little analysis of the impact of habits (particularly, external habits) onoptimal policy. In this paper we...

We find evidence of a bank lending channel for the euro area operating via bank risk.Financial innovation and the new ways to transfer credit risk have tended to diminishthe informational content of standard bank balance-sheet indicators. We show thatbank risk conditions, as perceived by...

We study how the structure of housing finance affects the transmission of monetarypolicy shocks. We document three main facts: first, the features of residentialmortgage markets differ markedly across industrialized countries; second, and accordingto a wide range of indicators, the transmission...

This paper examines monetary policy in a currency union whose member countries exhibitheterogeneous rates of limited asset markets participation (LAMP). As a result risksharing among member countries is imperfect and the monetary transmission mechanismcan dier across countries. In the limit the...

Recent attempts to incorporate optimal fiscal policy into NewKeynesian models subject to nominal inertia, have tended to assume that policymakers are benevolent and have access to a commitment technology. A separateliterature, on the New Political Economy, has focused on real economies...