We describe two examples which illustrate in different ways how money and credit may be useful in the conduct of monetary policy. Our first example shows how monitoring money and credit can help anchor private sector expectations about inflation. Our second example shows that a monetary policy...

We use a unique design feature of a survey of Italian firms to study the causal effect of inflation expectations on firms' economic decisions. In the survey, a randomly chosen subset of firms is repeatedly treated with information about recent inflation whereas other firms are not. This...

The Markov regime-switching modelling framework, with time-varying transition probabilities, is utilized to study the credibility of monetary policy in five member countries of the European Monetary System during the period 1979-98 (Austria, Belgium, France, Italy and the Netherlands). The...

This article analyses the welfare consequences of delegating to the central bank the task of minimising deviations of forecasts of goal variables from their target values. The delegated objectives considered in this article are motivated by the observation that central banks oftentimes operate...

Using a short-term interest rate as the monetary policy instrument can be problematic near its zero bound constraint. An alternative strategy is to use a long-term interest rate as the policy instrument. We find when Taylor-type policy rules are used to set the long rate in a standard New...