Whenever inflation rears its head, the call soon comes to raise interest rates. The rationale is simple. Higher interest rates put a damper on the supply of money. And this monetary clamp slows inflation. It’s so intuitive that it must be true. Or is it? As the Reverend Brooke observes, it...

The monetarism, as I have tried to outline in this work is based on the ideas of the American professor Milton Friedman, who tried to revitalize and reconfigure the old quantity theory of money. These ideas were transposed and discussed by authors like Ion Pohoață, Tiberiu Brăilean or Al....

We propose methods for testing hypothesis of non-causality at various horizons, as defined in Dufour and Renault (1998, Econometrica). We study in detail the case of VAR models and we propose linear methods based on running vector autoregressions at different horizons. While the hypotheses...

This paper examines how the fixed exchange rate policy followed in Cyprus for more than 40 years helped to deliver price stability amid high growth rates and low unemployment, and contributed to the successful adoption of the euro. The paper identifies some critical elements for the success of...

Since the 1970s, the overarching view in the literature has been that a Phillips curve relationship did not exist in Ireland prior to the 1979 exchange rate break with Sterling. It was argued that, as a small open economy, prices were determined externally. To test this relationship, we study...

We analyze optimal monetary policy in a sticky pricemodel where the central bank supplies money outrightvia asset purchases and lends money temporarily againstcollateral. The terms of central bank lending affect ra-tioning of money and impact on macroeconomic aggre-gates. The central bank can...

We present a thought-provoking study of two monetary models: the cash-in-advance and the Lagos and Wright (2005) models. We report that the different approach to modeling money - reduced-form vs. explicit role - neither induces theoretical nor quantitative differences in results. Given...

This paper presents evidence on the lag between monetary policy actions and the response of inflation in the euro area as a whole as well as in Germany, Italy and France. In line with previous findings for the US and the UK, results here show that this lag is longer than one year both in the...

In this paper I estimate a New Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model for the Euro Area, which closely follows the structure of the model developed by Smets and Wouters (2003, 2005, 2007), with the addition of the so-called financial accelerator mechanism developed in Bernanke,...

This paper shows that the interaction between money growth and staggered nominal contracts gives rise to a long-run inflation-unemployment tradeoff.