The first central banks were founded in the XVII century and monetary policy has been evolving ever since. Knowledge on monetary economy has improved significantly over the last couple of decades and a consensus has been reached in a number of areas. As a result, hyperinflations have been...

In recent years we have witnessed a growing trend in cashless transactions as well as products and services sold exclusively in this way. Also, after the onset of the global financial crisis, private crypto currencies appeared that have raised some concerns. All of these changes beg the question...

Modern central banks increasingly value monetary policy transparency, and attempt to build credibility by communicating their decisions to the public. This paper studies whether the communication of central banks can be used to explain upcoming changes in their most important monetary policy...

What are the effects of beliefs, sentiment, and uncertainty, over the business cycle? To answer this question, we develop a behavioral New Keynesian macroeconomic model, in which we relax the assumption of rational expectations. Agents are, instead, boundedly rational: they have a...

The 20th anniversary of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) offers an opportunity to look back on the ECB's record and learn lessons that can improve the conduct of policy in the future. This paper charts the way the ECB has defined, interpreted and applied its monetary policy framework - its...

The bursting of the Japanese bubble economy in the early 1990s put the stage for a lasting lowzero-, and negative-interest rate environment, which fundamentally changed the business environment for the Japanese commercial banks. On the income side, with interest margins becoming increasingly...

The heterogeneity of businesses and households impacts aggregate economic fluctuations and, in turn, is shaped by aggregate fluctuations. This view has emerged over the last decade with strong implications for the transmission and conduct of monetary policy. Our thematic review focuses on key...

Since Barnett derived the user cost price of money, the economic theory of monetary services aggregation has been developed and extended into a field of its own with solid foundations in microeconomic theory. Divisia monetary aggregates have repeatedly been shown to be strictly preferable to...

The price system, the adjustment of prices to changes in market conditions, is the primary mechanism by which markets function and by which the three most basic questions get answered: what to produce, how much to produce and for whom to produce. To the behaviour of price and price system,...

This paper provides new empirical evidence that bears on the efficacy of unconventional monetary policies when the main policy rate is negative. When a negative interest rate policy (NIRP) is deployed in concert with rate forward guidance (FG) and quantitative easing (QE), the identification of...