This note identifies supply factors, particularly the exchange rate, as key drivers of inflation in South Africa. Demand factors play a negligible role, with a flat Phillips curve apparent since the inception of the country's inflation targeting regime. The Phillips curve flattened further with...

Central banks have used different types of forward guidance, where the forward guidance horizon is related to a state contingency, a calendar date or left open-ended. This paper reports cross-country evidence on the impact of these different types of forward guidance on the sensitivity of bond...

Beginning with the global financial crisis (2008) the correlation between crude oil prices and medium-term and forward inflation expectations increased leading to fears of their un-anchoring. Using the first principal component of commodity prices as a measure for global aggregate demand, we...

We identify structural vector autoregressions using narrative sign restrictions. Narrative sign restrictions constrain the structural shocks and the historical decomposition around key historical events, ensuring that they agree with the established narrative account of these episodes. Using...

Do the benefits of central bank transparency depend on the structure of financial markets? We address this question in a two-country model with dispersed information among price-setting firms. The volatility of the real exchange rate is non-monotonic in the precision of public communications....

We study optimal monetary policy in an environment in which firms' pricing and production decisions are subject to informational frictions. Our framework accommodates multiple formalizations of these frictions, including dispersed private information, sticky information, and certain forms of...

This paper assesses how the financial system influences the strength of the liquidity effect in a calibrated limited participation model of the monetary transmission mechanism. The model suggests that bankbased systems should be characterized by smaller liquidity effects since monetary...

A Real Business Cycle model of the UK is developed to account for the behaviour of UK nonstationary macro data. The model, when tested by the method of indirect inference, can explain the behaviour of main variables (GDP, real exchange rate, real interest rate). We use it to explain how 'crisis'...