At the zero lower bound, the scale and scope of non-conventional monetary policies have become the key decision variables for monetary policy makers. In the UK, quantitative easing has involved the creation of a fund to purchase medium term dated government bonds with borrowed central bank...

Central banks have sometimes turned their attention to long-term interest rates as a target or as a diagnosis of policy. This paper describes two historical episodes when this happened - the US in 1942-51 and the UK in the 1960s - and uses a model of inflation dynamics to evaluate monetary...

The substantial fluctuations in house prices recently experienced by many industrialized economies have stimulated a vivid debate on the possible implications for monetary policy. In this paper, we ask whether the U.S. Fed, the Bank of Japan and the Bank of England have reacted to house prices....

This paper addresses two important questions that have, so far, been studied separately in the literature. First, the paper aims at explaining the high volatility of long-term interest rates observed in the data, which is hard to replicate using standard macro models. Building a small-scale...

Since 1997, the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) has met monthly to set the UK policy interest rate. We examine evidence of systematic patterns in exchange rate movements on MPC days over the first decade of operation of the MPC. Daily data reveal significant differences in...

Central banks have sometimes turned their attention to long-term interest rates as a target or as a diagnosis of policy. This paper describes two historical episodes when this happened - the US in 1942-51 and the UK in the 1960s - and uses a model of inflation dynamics to evaluate monetary...

This paper argues that the inflation targeting regime prevailing in the United Kingdom is not the result of a change in policymaker objectives. By conducting an analysis of U.K. policymakers that parallels Romer and Romer's (2004) study of Federal Reserve Chairmen, I demonstrate that policymaker...

This paper assesses Revolutionary and Napoleonic wartime economic policy. Suspension of gold convertibility in 1797 allowed the Bank of England to nurture British monetary orthodoxy. The Order of the Privy Council suspended gold payments on Bank of England notes and afforded simultaneous...