This paper quantifies for the United Kingdom the general equilibrium costs of individuals holding cash to economise on 'shopping time'. These are a subset of a wider range of costs caused by inflation. The paper tests whether or not money balances tend to a finite number as nominal interest...

In recent work, Stacey Tevlin and Karl Whelan argue that aggregate econometric models fail to capture the US investment boom in plant and machinery in the second half of the 1990s, whereas a disaggregated approach does much better. In particular, they show that aggregate models do not capture...

The most popular simple rule for the interest rate, due to Taylor, is meant to inform monetary policy in closed economies. On the other hand, its main open-economy alternative, Ball's rule based on a monetary conditions index (MCI), may perform poorly in the face of specific types of exchange...

In this paper the popular Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (BGG) model is used to explore links between the financial health of the non-financial corporate sector and bank lending behaviour on the one hand, and the effectiveness of monetary policy on the other. The model's microeconomic...

In this paper the determinants of failure among individual UK public and private companies are examined, over the period from 1991 to 2001. Using information on profitability, interest cover, capital gearing, liquidity, company size, industry, whether a firm is a subsidiary and overall economic...

Is further economic convergence between European Monetary System (EMS) member countries desirable? This paper addresses some of the convergence issues currently being raised in the debate over Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in Europe, with particular emphasis on the behaviour of real interest...

This paper reviews the theory of balance-of-payments crises, and its implications for identifying potential leading indicators of crises. It discusses and evaluates three different empirical approaches to balance-of-payments crises: the signalling, discrete-choice, and structural approaches....

In this paper, the question of whether in the United Kingdom the choice of the operational framework for monetary policy has been systematically related to patterns in money market rates is examined. Attention is first focused on the Bank of England's policy target, the two-week repo rate. The...

Implied probability density functions (PDFs) estimated from cross-sections of observed option prices are gaining increasing attention amongst academics and practitioners. To date, however, little attention has been paid to the robustness of these estimates or to the confidence that users can...

The previous literature on the benefits of price level versus inflation targeting has, with some qualifications, established that price level targeting entails lower price level variance at the expense of higher inflation and output variance. This paper investigates the properties of monetary...