What role could unconventional monetary policy - and particularly unconventional policies like private asset purchases under a quantitative easing or lender of last resort scheme - play in influencing economic growth directly? A wide literature in economics explores the pros and cons of using...

This paper analyzes institutional arrangements for exchange rate systems and reviews what we know. It looks at the foreign exchange market, different balance of payment situations in which countries find themselves and the necessary exchange rate adjustments. It studies the options that are...

Transparency has become a prominent feature of monetary policy. This paper provides an overview of central bank communication practices and is the first to systematically analyze transparency trends throughout the world and across monetary policy frameworks. It shows that increases in...

Central bank governor changes in emerging markets may convey important signals about future monetary policy. Based on a new daily data set, this paper examines the reactions of foreign exchange markets, domestic stock market indices and sovereign bond spreads to central bank governor changes....

Previous research on the optimal size of a monetary policy committee (MPC) focused on theoretical analyses and experimental studies. These studies suggest that the ideal monetary policy committee may not have many more than five members. In this paper we conduct an empirical cross-country study...

Conventional economic policy models focus only on selected elements of the central bank balance sheet, in particular monetary liabilities and sometimes foreign reserves. The canonical model of an independent central bank assumes that it chooses money (or an interest rate) unconstrained by a need...

The aim of this paper is to examine the theoretical and empirical arguments for the relationship between the exchange-rate regime and economic growth. As a nominal variable, the exchange rate (regime) might not affect the long-run economic growth. However, there is no unambiguous theoretical...

Based on a classification of countries and territories according to their regime and anchor currency choice, the study considers the two major currency blocs of the present world. A nested logit regression suggests that long-term structural economic variables determine a given country's currency...

In the analysis of the credit crisis of 2007-2010 a clear distinction should be made between (i) the initial shock; (ii) the propagation and amplification of the initial shock to the systemic crisis of the financial markets; and (iii) the transmission of the credit crisis to the real economic...

The paper identifies based on the monetary overinvestment theories by Wicksell (1898), Mises (1912) and Hayek (1929) monetary policy mistakes in large industrial countries issuing international currencies. It its argued that a neglect towards monetary policy reform in a world dominated by...