The development of tractable forward looking models of monetary policy has lead to an explosion of research on the implications of adopting Taylor-type interest rate rules. Indeterminacies have been found to arise for some specifications of the interest rate rule, raising the possibility of...

In a plain-vanilla New Keynesian model with two-period staggered price-setting, discretionary monetary policy leads to multiple equilibria. Complementarity between the pricing decisions of forward-looking firms underlies the multiplicity, which is intrinsically dynamic in nature. At each point...

This paper uses the open economy structural VAR model developed in Buckle, Kim, Kirkham, McLellan and Sharma (2002) to evaluate the impact of monetary policy on New Zealand business cycles and inflation variability and the output/ inflation variance trade-off. The model includes a forward-...

The bank lending channel theory posits that during monetary contractions banks restrict some firms’ loans, thus reducing their desired investment independently of interest rates. Previous research finds small firms reduce, while large firms accelerate, loan growth. We find that small firms...

The Czech banking system is seen by many observers to be the most successful of all former socialist economies’. But have Czech banks successfully provided worthy enterprises with sufficient credit from the funds made available to them? Using data from the Czech National Bank and data on...

This paper incorporates heterogeneous agents into a NNS model with nominal inertia. Heterogeneous households are introduced into NNS models to try and reconcile the movements in interest rates, consumption and inflation. The key findings here are that heterogeneity and wage inertia are needed to...

Liquidity problems lie at the heart of crises on financial markets as demonstrated in this paper by detailed descriptions of the stock market crash in 1987, the LTCM-crisis in 1998 and the financial market consequences of 11 September 2001. The events also demonstrate that modern central banks,...

The perceptions of a central bank’s inflation aversion may reflect institutional structure or, more dynamically, the history of its policy decisions. In this paper, we present a novel empirical framework that uses high frequency data to test for persistent variation in market perceptions of...

There has been mounting evidence that the inflation process has been changing. Inflation is now much lower and much more stable around the globe. And its sensitivity to measures of economic slack and increases in input costs appears to have declined. Probably the most widely supported...

The effectiveness of a central bank's monetary policy depends on the incentives of its head and board members to pursue an efficient policy in the citizens interest. Today, however, these incentives are weakened by three kinds of regulations. First, in almost all countries, only nationals may be...