Two recent empirical papers have presented results indicating that the U.S. Federal Reserve deserved much blame as a cause of the latest boom and bust in house prices and activity. Both papers are important contributions, but neither study allows for the impact of long-term interest rates, which...

We examine inflation and uncertainty in the UK with a version of the Markov Switching model, which allows for changes in the variance as well as in the mean and persistence of a series. We find that the UK’s attempts at exchange rate pegs in the form of shadowing the deutschmark and entering...

Adherence to the classical gold standard entailed nominal exchange rate rigidity between member countries. A failure of price levels to co-move between members would thus lead to real exchange rate misalignment, with potential trade imbalances and financial crises following. We examine inflation...

Housing is the leading indicator of the business cycle. The impact of monetary policy on housing has thus unsurprisingly been the subject of numerous studies. Some have also investigated whether the impact of monetary policy has changed since the mid-1980s. These papers to date have relied on...