There is a considerable academic literature on the relationship between Central Bank independence and inflation but the issue of Central Bank accountability and its effect of inflation performance has received very little attention. This paper looks at the issue of accountability in a simple...

This paper examines UK business cycle fluctuations in 22 complete cycles since 1871. We catalogue the incidence and typical duration of UK business cycles. The summary statistics of the economy are explored, including the spectral density, sample covariation and cross spectrum of macroeconomic...

In this paper we review some fundamental issues that have been identified by macroeconomists in discussing the co-ordination of monetary and fiscal policy. As Sargent and Wallace (1981) graphically illustrated, the consolidated public sector present-value budget constraint means that monetary...

Monetary authorities often seem reluctant to discuss the conduct of monetary policy. There is a concern that greater openness in monetary policy-making may lead to volatility in financial markets, and specifically in interest rates. To date there is very little direct empirical evidence; however,...

We develop two variants of an open economy general equilibrium model employing Blanchard-Yaari life overlapping generations, which are shown to capture a number of important aspects of the UK economic cycle. We analyse the equilibrium stochastic processes of the model’s endogenous variables in...

We employ an expectations augmented Phillips curve framework to investigate the link between inflation, unit labour costs, the output gap, the real exchange rate and inflation expectations. Using multivariate cointegration techniques, we find evidence consistent with mark-up behaviour of output...

In this paper we incorporate the term structure of interest rates in a standard inflation forecast targeting framework. We find that under flexible inflation targeting and uncertainty in the degree of persistence in the economy, allowing for active learning possibilities has effects on the...

In this paper we incorporate the term structure of interest rates in a standard inflation forecast targeting framework. We find that under flexible inflation targeting and uncertainty in the degree of persistence in the economy, allowing for active learning possibilities has effects on the...