This paper addresses two fundamental questions about monetary policy, credit conditions and corporate activity. First, can we relate differences in the composition of debt between tight and loose periods of monetary policy to firm characteristics like size, age, indebtedness or risk? Second, do...

The past few years have witnessed a trend of increased delegation of authority to central banks. Increasing central bank independence is a recommended strategy for governments to establish a credible commitment to price stability as the final objective of the monetary authority, even at the cost...

In this paper Engel-Granger time series methodology is used to combine trending economic variables with stationary political factors to search for well-defined political influences on central government budgets in Canada over the entire post-Confederation time period from 1870 to 2000. To...

Until the early 1980s, foreign exchange rate controls were the dominant policy in Ghana, Nigeria and Uganda. However, because of the huge fiscal deficits and expansionary monetary policies, coupled with chronic terms of trade shocks and policy error/inadequacies, the foreign exchange rates is...

The authors provide some evidence consistent with a heterogeneous credit channel of monetary policy transmission in the European Union. Using the techniques of cointegration and Error Correction Models, the authors have shown that the external finance premium is one important leading indicator...

Recently, several central banks have abandoned the usual secrecy in monetary policy and become very transparent. This paper provides an explanation for this puzzling fact, focussing on the disclosure of central bank forecasts. It shows that transparency reduces the inflationary bias and gives...

Sargent and Wallace (1981) have shown by an example, termed "spectacular", that a lowering of the growth rate of money may in some cases increase the rate of inflation - not only in the end, but even from the start. I show that this "spectacular" result ceases to hold if the central bank is...

We define and study transparency, credibilitym and reputation in a model where the central bank's characteristics are unobservable to the private sector and are inferred from the policy outcome. A low-credibility bank optimally conducts a more inflationary policy than a high-credibility bank, in...

The first section of this paper presents a model of the economy and poses the problem of optimal monetary policy. The second characterizes the responses of endogenous variables, including nominal interest rates, to shocks under an optimal regime, and highlights the advantages of commitment, by...