This Occasional Paper analyses how significant expansions in central banks’ mandates, roles and instruments can result in challenges to the independence of monetary policy. The paper reviews, in particular, some of the key challenges to central bank independence brought about by the global...

This Occasional Paper analyses how significant expansions in central banks' mandates, roles and instruments can result in challenges to the independence of monetary policy. The paper reviews, in particular, some of the key challenges to central bank independence brought about by the global...

Using the Johansen cointegration technique, we find empirical evidence of long run co-movements between five national stock market indexes and measures of aggregate real activity including the real oil price, real consumption, real money, and real output. Real returns on these indexes are...

It is well known fact that all good things, as also bad things, come to an end and business cycles pass through good and bad economic times. Economically 2010 was a year of transition from economic recession to recovery. Economies were improving in some countries and industries were showing...

The global financial crisis has now spread across multiple countries and sectors, affecting both financial and real spheres in the advanced as well as the developing economies. This has been caused by policies based on "rational expectation" models that advocate deregulated finance, with...

The global financial crisis has now spread across multiple countries and sectors, affecting both financial and real spheres in the advanced as well as the developing economies. This has been caused by policies based on “rational expectation” models that advocate deregulated finance, with...

A series of papers have shown that a monetary regime targeting nominal GDP (NGDP) can reproduce the distribution of risk that would exist if there were widespread use of state-contingent debt securities (Koenig, 2013; Sheedy, 2014; Azariadis et al., 2016, Bullard and DiCecia, 2018). This paper...

Correlations of inflation with the growth rate of money increase when data are averaged over longer time periods. Correlations of inflation with the growth of money also are higher when high-inflation as well as low-inflation countries are included in the analysis. We show that serial...

In this paper I examine whether one can use analyst forecasts of macroeconomic variables to improve investors ex-ante allocation of wealth between stocks and bonds. Such forecasts provide a forward-looking approach which I find improves investor's information set for the myopic stock-bond...

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the social as well as professional lives of individuals. The COVID-19 pandemic pushed economies into a Lockdown. However, it generated the worst recession since the Great Depression. This paper concentrates primarily on the most contributing factors to the...