The paper traces the dangers in the closed economy perspective of a   monetary policy focused on a domestic inflation goal under a clean   float.  Field evidence of the damage wrought from this perspective is   reinforced by that from a laboratory experiment.  The laboratory  ...

To date the cointegrating properties and the regime-switching behavior of the term structure are two separate strands of the literature. This paper integrates these lines of research and introduces regime shifts into a cointegrated VAR model. We argue that the short run dynamics of the...

It is sometimes argued that central banks influence the private economy in the short run through controlling a specific component of high powered money, not its total amount. Using a structural VAR approach, this paper evaluates this claim empirically, in the context of the Japanese economy. It...

This paper reports estimates of monetary policy reaction functions for two sets of countries: the G3 (Germany, Japan and the United States) and the E3 (France, Italy and the United Kingdom). It finds that since 1979 each of the G3 central banks has pursued an implicit form of inflation...

Weak public institutions, including high levels of corruption, characterize many developing countries. With a simple model, we demonstrate that institutional quality has important implications for the design of monetary policies and can produce several departures from the conventional wisdom. We...

It is widely recognised that the "one-size-fits-all" monetary policy of the euro-zone is a potential problem. How much of a problem has not been much investigated. It is argued in this paper that it may result in the euro not being sustainable in the longer term without drastic changes to other...

The possible emergence of a monetary union in Europe raises a number of new and difficult questions. A central concern is the implication for fiscal policy-making. Fiscal policy assumes an increased importance once the monetary policy instrument is lost. The Delors Report has suggested that...

A vast empirical literature has documented delayed and persistent effects of monetary policy shocks on output. We show that this finding results from the aggregation of output impulse responses that differ sharply depending on the timing of the shock: When the monetary policy shock takes place...

This paper shows that the government can achieve its precommitment outcome in monetary policy when output follows an autoregressive process, by offering the central banker a linear inflation contract, and where the parameters of the contract depend on lagged output. This note therefore offers an...

In this paper I address the following questions. - Has the business cycle become longer and shallower? And why? - How stabilizing is monetary policy. In answering these questions I summarize recent research undertaken by Adrian Pagan and myself that formalizes the procedures developed by Burns...