The last fifteen years have seen the emergence of widespread consensus that optimum monetary policy is designed on the basis of three pillars: a short-term official rate of interest as the sole policy instrument and the placing of that instrument in the hands of a central bank which is (a)...

In the course of the last year or so, the Bank of England has come under pressure to raise interest rates on the grounds that a ‘lax’ monetary policy in the face of persistent overshoots of the inflation target risks undermining the Bank’s hard-won credibility. Using the Bayesian as well...

In the fifteen years leading up to the financial crisis in 2008, there emerged a great deal of agreement on the optimal design of monetary policy. This policy ‘consensus’ was accompanied also by a widely-shared view of how macroeconomies worked as the ‘Keynesian’ versus ‘monetarist’...

This paper presents an empirical investigation into the level and stability of money demand (M1) in Nigeria between 1960 and 2008. In addition to estimating the canonical specification, alternative specifications are presented that include additional variables to proxy for the cost of holding...

We use vector autoregressive models to estimate the effect of monetary policy on investors’ risk aversion. The latter is proxied by a variety of option based implied volatility indices for Germany and the UK. There is clear evidence of a procyclical response between monetary policy and risk...