In this paper, the role of the financial position of private agents in the transmission of monetary policy (the balance-sheet channel) is explored. To the extent that officila interest rates are able to affect the market value and the income flows of certain categories of financial instruments...

This paper analyses the cyclical behaviour of bank credit, loan losses and provisions for loan losses in Spain. These three variables are strongly cyclical in Spain -as in many other countries- and this poses some problems to bank supervisors and regulators. In a context of strong competitive...

This paper develops a simple intertemporal model of inflation targets within a framework in which the public is uncertain about the dependability of policymakers, and in which policymakers do not perfectly control inflation. The framework is used to evaluate the effects of various parameters...

The macroeconomic reasons for the recent banking crises in the Nordic countries are analysed using an econometric model estimated with panel data from the 1980s and 1990s. Two alternative dependent variables are used: the ratio of banks oan losses to lending and enterprise bankruptcies per...

This paper starts with a brief description of the situation before the establishment of the European Monetary Union (EMU), i.e., the problems of the European Monetary Systems (EMS) which was established in 1979 and which was in need of repair. The paper then deals with the various possibilities...

In this paper we speculate about the evolution of the international monetary system in the last two-thirds of the twentieth century absent the Great Depression, but present the major post-Depression political and economic upheavals: World War II and the Cold War. We argue that without the...

Several authors have recently interpreted the ECB's two-pillar framework as separate approaches to forecast and analyse inflation at different time horizons or frequency bands. The ECB has publicly supported this understanding of the framework. This paper presents further evidence on the...

This paper analyses US–European policy interactions under different assumptions about the policy-making regime and the nature of the fiscal environment, contrasting the standard Keynesian case with an anti-Keynesian case in which government spending cuts are expansionary. When fiscal policy is...

This paper studies the evolution of monetary policy targets over the course of the past 200 years. We argue that policy targets are set as part of an assignment procedure that is intended to address both time consistency and monitoring problems. As a result, central banks, after having been...

Advances in the transaction technology allow agents to economize on the cost of cash management. We argue that accounting for the impact of new transaction technologies on currency holding behaviour is important to obtain theoretically consistent estimates of the demand for money. We modify a...