This paper develops a theory of central bank accountability. Two aspects of accountability are considered. The first one is transparency of actual monetary policy, the second aspect is the question of who bears final responsibility for monetary policy. Monetary policy is transparent if there is...

Opting for structural or reduced form estimation is often hard to justify if one wants to both learn about the structure of the economy and obtain accurate predictions. In this paper, we show that using both structural and reduced form estimates simultaneously can lead to more accurate policy...

This paper examines the role of long term debt for the political support of a monetary union or, more generally, an inflation-reduction policy. The central idea is that the decision about membership in the union leads to a redistribution between debtors and creditors, if they are holding long...

We investigate the effects of fiscal policy surprises for US data, using vector autoregressions.We overcome the difficulties that changes in fiscal policy may manifest themselves in variables other than fiscal variables first and that fiscal variables may respond 'automatically' to business...

The replacement of national currencies by a common currency in the EMU causes a monetary externality if the European Central Bank is inclined to monetize part of outstanding government debt in the community.High government debt in one part of the EU then increases the common inflation rate.We...

Evidence suggests that the Colombian interbank funds market is an inhomogeneous and hierarchical network in which a few financial institutions fulfill the role of “super-spreaders” of central bank liquidity among market participants. Results concur with evidence from other interbank markets...

We study the bond yield conundrum in a macro-finance framework. Building upon a exible and non-structural macro-finance model, we test the hypothesis that the bond yield conundrum is connected to various sources of uncertainty in the financial markets. Moreover we explicitly test for the role of...

In 2001, the Fed has lowered interest rates in a series of cuts, starting from 6.5 % at the end of 2000 to 2.0 % by early November.This paper asks, whether the Federal Reserve Bank has been surprising the markets, taking as given the conventional view about the effect of monetary policy...