Both the Fed's defenders and critics focus on macroeconomic questions. What is the correct monetary policy? Does the economy need an “activist” Fed? Should the central bank intervene to reduce unemployment, or focus on keeping prices stable? Should the Fed target interest rates or nominal...

Central bank balance sheets swelled in size in response to the financial crisis of 2007-09. In this article we discuss what makes them different from the balance sheets of other institutions, how they've been used in the past, and how they might evolve in the future as means to implement novel...

This paper takes stock of external audit arrangements at central banks. Its focus is on the annual audit of central bank financial statements, as well as legal and institutional measures that support audit quality and independence. The paper outlines good practices in these areas and provides a...

This article discusses a small scale pilot to harmonise three Bank of England statistical and regulatory data forms. The primary purpose of the pilot was to assess opportunities for improved operational efficiency in regulatory reporting. The broader purpose was to demonstrate how common data...

This paper examines the important but not often discussed issue of accounting in central banks. It highlights the distinguishing factors that make the financial statements of central banks unique relative to those produced by other bodies. We begin by explaining why central banks produce...

This study examines how the relationships between local governments and local enterprises moderate the effect of targeted monetary policies through different action-propagating mechanisms. First, we investigate the impact of monetary policies on enterprise investment in areas with different...

We consider a Diamond-type model of endogenous growth in which there are three assets: outside money, government bonds, and equity. Due to productivity shocks, the equity return is uncertain, and risk averse investors require a positive equity premium. Typically, there exist two steady states,...

The development of tractable forward looking models of monetary policy has lead to an explosion of research on the implications of adopting Taylor-type interest rate rules. Indeterminacies have been found to arise for some specifications of the interest rate rule, raising the possibility of...

We study a simple, microfounded macroeconomic system in which the monetary authority employs a Taylor-type policy rule. We analyze situations in which the self-confirming equilibrium is unique and learnable according to Bullard and Mitra (2002). We explore the prospects for the use of 'large...

Under rational expectations, monetary policy is generally highly effective in stabilizing the economy. Aggregate demand management operates through the expectations hypothesis of the term structure: Anticipated movements in future short-term interest rates control current demand. This paper...