This paper provides a brief survey of the role of financial frictions in the monetary transmission mechanism. After noting some of the key stylised facts that any model of the transmission mechanism must be consistent with, we discuss both the classical interest rate channel and the credit and...

This paper investigates the behaviour of the mark-up of prices over marginal costs under two different assumptions about market structure. In the customer market model firms lower their mark-up when current output is low relative to future profits, foregoing current profits in order to capture...

In many economies, the monetary policy instrument is the level of short-term nominal interest rates, but the monetary policy stance might be better characterised by the ex-ante real interest rate that this nominal rate implies, relative to some 'neutral' or 'natural' real rate of interest. In...

Any monetary policy maker using a short-term nominal interest rate as the primary policy tool will have an interest in understanding developments in ex-ante real interest rates. In this paper, several methods for calculating real interest rates for the United Kingdom are explored. These include:...