In post-independence sub-Saharan Africa, institutional arrangements for monetary policy have taken a variety of forms, although the historical evolution of many African financial systems has been similar. This paper identifies five different regimes and examines how they evolved over time. It...

This paper examines changes in the monetary policy transmission mechanism in the presence of derivatives markets. The effect of adding derivatives markets is analyzed independently for each of the main channels of monetary policy transmission: interest rates, credit, and exchange rates....

This paper uses the IMF''s macroeconomic model MULTIMOD to examine the implications of the zero-interest-rate floor (ZIF) for the design of monetary policy in Japan. Similar to findings in other studies, targeting rates of inflation lower than 2.0 percent significantly increases the likelihood...

This paper examines the monetary transmission mechanism in Egypt against the background of the central bank''s intention to shift to inflation targeting. It first describes the changing transmission channels over the last decade. Second, the channels are evaluated in a VAR model. The exchange...

This paper estimates the importance of the cost channel of monetary policy in a New Keynesian model of the business cycle. A model with nominal rigidities is extended by assuming that a fraction of firms need to borrow money to pay their wage bill. Hence, monetary policy tightenings increase...

This paper outlines important lessons for monetary policy. In particular, the role of inflation targeting, which was much acclaimed prior to the financial crisis and since then has not lost much of its endorsement, is critically reviewed. Ignoring the relation between monetary policy and asset...

This paper reviews the historical performance of monetary policy in Nigeria and discusses the relative merits of alternative monetary policy strategies that Nigeria could adopt in the future, once the many operational issues that today obstruct the conduct of monetary policy have been addressed....

This paper explores the behavior of money demand by explicitly accounting for the money supply endogeneity arising from endogenous monetary policy and financial innovations. Our theoretical analysis indicates that money supply factors matter in the money demand function when the money supply...

This paper investigates the transmission mechanism of monetary policy in the four largest euro area countries by means Bayesian estimation of dynamic econometric models. Based on pre-EMU evidence from Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, we show that: (i) there are differences in the timing of the...

We provide a framework for analyzing the choice between optimal and robust monetary policy rules in the presence of paradigm uncertainty. We first discuss the conditions on uncertainty that render a robust rule preferable to an optimal rule. Second, we show how the degree of risk aversion of the...