Most small island economies or "microstates" have distinctly different characteristics from larger developing economies. They are more open and vulnerable to external and environmental shocks, resulting in high output volatility. Most of them also suffer from locational disadvantages. Although a...

Under bond-rate transmission of monetary policy, the authors show that a generalized Taylor Principle applies, in which the average anticipated path of policy responses to inflation is subject to a lower bound of unity. This result helps explain how bond rates may exhibit stable responses to...

This study investigate how debt restructurings have evolved over the decades. Debtors and creditors have a long history of engaging an outsider a third partyʺ, such as the IMF to organise and facilitate debt restructurings. As we show, the importance of these third partiesʺ has grown over...

This paper uses real-time briefing forecasts prepared for the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to provide estimates of historical changes in the design of U.S. monetary policy and in the implied central-bank target for inflation. Empirical results support a description of policy with an...

The Eurozone crisis mobilises an appreciable amount of the attention of politicians and the public, with calls for a decisive defence of the euro, because the single currency's demise is said to be the beginning of the end of the EU and Single European Market. In our view, preserving the euro...

Expectations of Sterling returning to Gold have been disregarded in empirical work on the US dollar - Sterling exchange rate in the early 1920s. We incorporate such considerations in a PPP model of the exchange rate, letting the probability of a return to gold follow a logistic function. We draw...

This paper presents a history of the primary dealer system from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. The paper focuses on two formal programs: the "recognized" dealer program adopted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 1939 and the "qualified" dealer program adopted by the Federal Open...

To detect the quantity theory of money, we follow Lucas (1980) by looking at scatter plots of filtered time series of inflation and money growth rates and interest rates and money growth rates. Like Whiteman (1984), we relate those scatter plots to sums of two-sided distributed lag coefficients...

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 works covers peculiarities of formation of Georgian monetary system in XI-XII centuries and their effect on the international financial and economic relations. In this works we have researched the matters of formation of monetary policy of feudal age and their effect on development of...