Immediately after 1997 General Election, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, gave the Monetary Policy Committee a single objective, which is an Inflation Target, defined as 2.5% for retail price inflation, excluding mortgage interest payments, i.e. RPIX. So, as you may imagine, the...

In this paper we construct a rational expectations model based on a Phillips curve that embodies persistence in inflation. As we assume that the central bank targets the natural rate of output, there is no inflation bias. We derive optimal monetary policy rules that are state-contingent and...

No abstract available.

This paper tries to provide a simple explanation for the empirical finding, documented here and also by Hau, Killeen and Moore (2002), that spreads in the spot USD/EUR market are substantially higher than those in the preceding DEM/USD foreign exchange market. The paper argues that it is...

Following Lawrence Harris (1989b) study of price clustering in stock prices, we examine the smae phenomenon in the forex market. The pattern of clustering in the final digit of bid/ask prices depends on the desired degree of price resolution. The selection of spreads also involves clustering,...

No abstract available.

Most of those who take macro and monetary policy decisions are agents.  The worst penalty which can be applied to these agents is to sack them.  Agents thus have loss functions which are bounded above.  We work with a bell loss function which has this property.  With additive uncertainty the...

Using a new database covering some 91 supervisory agencies, this paper examines how important various skilled experts are in the regulatory process and the relative usage of different kinds of such experts. We seek to explore what kind of perspective supervisors in different institutional...

This paper develops a model of the lender of last resort (LOLR). In a simple one-period setting, the Central Bank (CB) should only rescue banks which are above a threshold size, thus providing an analytical basis for ¶too big to fail¶. In a dynamic setting, the CBs optimal LOLR policy is time...