The 1989 Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act provides a natural experiment in which the effects of institutional change on economic relationships can be studied. The Act set price stability as the single objective of monetary policy and gave the Bank great independence in achieving that goal. We...

We parameterize central-bank independence in terms of partisanship and term length, and we focus on the implications of alternative policy structures for real economic activity. While long terms of office for the central banker can reduce the role of electoral surprises, term lengths that are...

In this paper, a simple search model of the labor market is combined with sticky prices to investigate the dynamic response of the economy to nominal interest rate shocks. The framework allows the respective roles of labor market search, nominal price rigidities, and policy inertia in accounting...

A model of interest rate movements in response to new information on the money stock is developed.The model, which incorporates several earlier approaches as special cases, makes explicit the manner in which estimated interest rate responses to money surprises depend on the relative variances of...