We compare the duration and performance of different monetary regimes, especially the contrast between countries those that fix exchange rates and those that target inflation. Inflation targeting is a more durable policy; no country has yet been forced to abandon an inflation target, while many...

En el presente trabajo se hace una comparación institucional del funcionamiento del Banco de la República bajo los dos regímenes que han tenido a su cargo la política monetaria en Colombia: la Junta Monetaria y la Junta Directiva. Se determina que aún cuando se evidencia una correlación...

Underdeveloped financial markets and periods of high inflation have stimulated dollarization and currency substitution in the economies of Central Asia. Some authors argue that the latter can pose serious obstacles for the effective conduct of monetary policy and can affect households’...

The idea that the 'credibility' of monetary policy is important receives almost universal assent. But the word can mean very different things in different contexts. In particular, the meaning that it has been given by the work of Robert Barro and David Gordon is a very special one. It should not...

Hooks and Robinson (2002) argue that deposit insurance in Texas during the 1920s induced banks to invest in riskier assets. Their regressions indicate that this manifestation of moral hazard may explain some of what happened, but not all. Some other mechanism, hitherto overlooked, must also have...

In his comment on our 2002 Journal of Economic History paper, Gary Richardson (2007) proposes that our work specifies moral hazard too narrowly. Richardson posits that fixed-rate deposit insurance leads to moral hazard which takes many forms. These include not only the usual notion of...

Economists in the United States wrote reams of commentary on Argentina’s recession-turned-depression of 1998-2002. Most ignored basic facts that were readily available. As a result, they committed important errors, including mistaking Argentina’s central banking system for a...

How should banks be regulated? Must governments tightly regulate banks to prevent financial panics, or is little or no regulation best? Can private banks be trusted to issue paper money or must this activity be a government monopoly? Theory can help answer these questions, but increasingly in...

In a model with imperfect money, credit and reserve markets, we examine if an inflation-targeting central bank using the funds rate operating procedure to indirectly control market interest rates also needs a monetary aggregate as policy instrument. We show that if private agents use information...

This paper employs semi-annual observations from 1964s1 to 2005s1 to evaluate the monetary transmission mechanism that has operated in Pakistan. It does so by using the familiar VAR approach and by analysing impulse responses and variance decompositions to banking sector and macroeconomic...