The Bank Restriction Act of 1797 suspended the convertibility of the Bank of England's notes into gold. The current historical consensus is that the suspension was a result of the state's need to finance the war, France's remonetization, a loss of confidence in the English country banks, and a...

Recent work has found several ways of restricting central bank behavior to achieve much of the gain of commitment over discretion. This paper compares three such impediments: A quadratic penalty on interest rate changes, a fixed penalty on any rate change, and forced infrequency of rate change....

The paper investigates the link between monetary policy and structural reforms in open economies. We test three hypotheses: (a) the Calmfors hypothesis that the degree of reforms is higher in the case of autonomous policy and lower in the case of commitment, (b) the TINA hypothesis which implies...