Dealing with uncertainty is the daily bread of central bankers and has been a central theme for the ECB since its inception. Central banks like other economic operators are continuously confronted with conflicting data as well as competing and evolving interpretations of the working of the...

This paper reviews the "Austrian" theory of the business cycle first proposed by Friedrich Hayek in the 1920s. His theory claimed that credit creation by monetary authorities would push investment beyond society's long-term willingness to save, creating a mismatch between supply and demand that...

In this paper, we introduce credit ceilings in the standard model of the money multiplier and analyze their role in central bank's management of money supply in the presence of indirect monetary instruments. We show that under a regime of total credit ceilings, their optimal value equals the...

Growth and inflation in Turkey have been volatile over the last two decades. It would, therefore, be useful to identify indicators that anticipate economic conditions and inflation. This paper investigates the predictive performance of economic indicators for inflation and real output growth in...

This paper reviews the reserve requirement arrangements of sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on the differences between reserve requirements on domestic- and foreign-currency deposits. The reserve requirement systems in sub-Saharan Africa are relatively simple and transparent, but in some countries...

This paper provides some practical advice on establishing initial conditions in support of an inflation-targeting monetary framework. These conditions are divided into four areas: a mandate in support of an inflation objective and accountability for achieving this objective; macroeconomic...