Long-horizon interest rates in the major international bond markets fell sharply during 2004 and 2005, at the same time as US policy rates were rising; a phenomenon famously described as a 'conundrum' by Alan Greenspan the Federal Reserve Chairman. But it was arguably the decline in...

This paper studies how the real exchange rate might respond to product innovation (improvements in the quality of goods) as opposed to process innovation (increased efficiency in the production of goods). We develop a two-country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, where quality...

Banks have recently developed new techniques for gauging the credit risk associated with portfolios of illiquid, defaultable instruments. These techniques could revolutionise banks' management of credit risk and could in the longer term serve as a more risk-sensitive basis for calculating...

This paper analyses how well a 'limited participation' model of the monetary transmission mechanism is able to match important aspects of the UK economy. Given that the endogenous monetary policy rule being followed by the monetary authority is not explicitly modelled, the model might not be...

Why have central banks become more accountable and transparent in recent years? This paper considers a set of analytical models of monetary policy institutions to shed light on this. One conclusion it reaches is that uncertainty - regarding the central bank's inflation preferences or about the...

This paper assesses the cross-country 'stylised facts' on empirical measures of the losses incurred during periods of banking crises. Firstly, the direct resolution costs to the government are considered, and then the broader costs to the welfare of the economy (proxied by losses in GDP). The...

It has recently been suggested by Robert Lucas that `shoe-leather' costs of inflation may amount to as much as 1% of GNP in the United States. This paper assesses the UK evidence for the period 1970-1994. Similar estimates to those of Lucas are found using his original specification, but a...

The announcement of BCCI's closure on 5 July 1991 rapidly accelerated the withdrawal of wholesale funds from small and medium-sized UK banks. Within three years, a quarter of the banks in this sector had, in some sense, failed. This study employs a logit model to analyse at two points prior to...

A number of dealership markets share three common features: customer-dealer trades remain undisclosed, inter-dealer trading forms a substantial part of total trading and dealers have a choice, when dealing with each other, between doing so directly and using an inter-dealer broker (IDB). Using a...

The implications of uncertain policy preferences for the targeting and contracting approaches to monetary policy are investigated. It is shown that, in the presence of uncertain preferences, a linear incentive contract in the sense of Walsh performs better than an explicit inflation target as...