This Occasional Paper analyses how significant expansions in central banks' mandates, roles and instruments can result in challenges to the independence of monetary policy. The paper reviews, in particular, some of the key challenges to central bank independence brought about by the global...

Credible analyses and evidence submitted by experts from universities, international organizations and independent think tanks show that the trends which led to the 2008 worldwide financial crisis remain intact. As a result, central for responsible leaderships should be the concern how to...

Deteriorating economic conditions in late 2008 led the Federal Reserve to lower the target federal funds rate to near zero, inject liquidity into the financial system through novel facilities, and engage in large scale asset purchases. The combination of conventional and unconventional policy...

The aim of this work is to compare and contrast different ways of modeling financial shocks and financial intermediaries in the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models (DSGE models) and to discuss the empirical evidence on the importance of modeling financial sector and financial shocks in...

Fears of deflation and long-term stagnation have become more commonplace since the Great Recession. Yet, within the mainstream, economists are divided into two camps: those who see the benefits of downward wage and price adjustment, as a private sector stabilizer, and those who fear deflationary...

We introduce external risks, in the form of shocks to the level and volatility of world interest rates, into a small open economy model subject to the risk of sudden stops—large recessions together with abrupt reversals in capital inflows| and characterize optimal macroprudential policy in...

The bargaining power of international banks is currently still very high as compared to what it was at the time of the Bretton Woods conference. As a consequence, systemic financial crises are likely to remain recurrent phenomena with large effects on macroeconomic aggregates. Mainstream...

The paper proposes three options for overcoming the zero bound on interest rate policy: a carry tax on money, open market operations in long bonds, and monetary transfers. A variable carry tax on electronic bank reserves could enable a central bank to target negative nominal interest rates. A...

In this study I examine the welfare implications of monetary policy by constructing a novel New Keynesian model that properly accounts for asset pricing facts. I find that the Ramsey optimal monetary policy yields an inflation rate above 3.5% and inflation volatility close to 1.5%. The same...

In this paper, we examine the trends in the CPI and the core part of the CPI to bring out a grievous error in the core CPI. The core in certain years shows a jump of as much as 7% in certain quarters due to the error in the way the rent prices are computed. During the periods following the Pay...