By setting bounds on money growth, the commodity standard is a solution to the monetary authority's time inconsistency problem, which arises from the fixed wage structure of the economy. If there is a supply shock to the backing commodity, the suspension of the commodity standard may be...

The shift to inflation targeting has contributed to the relatively low inflation observed in some emerging market economies although, as noted by many economists, the preconditions required for a successful implementation were not in place. The existence of managed exchange rate regimes, a...

The last decade has witnessed two groundbreaking developments in monetary economics: The growth in digital private currencies and negative interest rate policies (NIRP), leaving the zero lower bound no longer binding. These developments have introduced two parallel discussions surrounding the...

Abstract Negative interest rates policies (NIRP), usually depicted in economic textbooks as an impossibility due to the prospect of infinite demand for money, are now a reality in several countries due to different reasons. But while the ZLB has been surpassed when it comes to Central Banks, it...

This paper empirically investigates the effectiveness of monetary policy transmission in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries using a structural vector autoregressive model. The originality and significance of the paper are in constructing and analyzing "synthetic" aggregate variables...

Paul Krugman recently attacked the Swedish Riksbank for its monetary policy that it has caused a deflationary process because it raised its key interest rate in 2010 and 2011 and by this triggered unnecessarily a deflationary process afterwards. He used the term sadomonetarist for this kind of...

The calculation of forward rates implied in Treasury spot rates is well known. A simple extension that uses yields on TIPS and similar-maturity conventional Treasury securities to estimate changes in the market's expectation of inflation is less well known. One interesting opportunity to apply...

Baseline Chinese economic data is unreliable. Taking published National Bureau of Statistics China data on the components of consumer price inflation, I attempt to reconcile the official data to third party data. Three problems are apparent in official NBSC data on inflation. First, the base...

Official statistics measuring the cost of living are known to suffer from several biases because they often do not accurately capture substitution patterns, product entry/exit, and preference shifts. In particular, the latter two biases have been shown to be large on average. This paper shows...

The analysis of open macroeconomies typically assumes (implicitly or explicitly) that resource allocation decisions are taken by domestic agents. The Portfolio Theory of Inflation (PTI) developed in this study assumes that some critical allocation decisions are taken by global investors and...