I analyse central bank transparency when the central bank's objective function is its private information. Non-transparency exists when the public does not observe the action of the central bank and an unobservable component of the inflation-control error keeps the public from using its...

Confirmation bias refers to cognitive errors that bias one towards one's own prior beliefs. A vast empirical literature documents its existence and psychologists identify it as one of the most problematic aspects of human reasoning. In this paper, we present three related scenarios where...

The purpose of the UDROP proposal is to prevent debt rollover crises for foreign-currency-denominated debt instruments. For such liabilities, there is no international analogue to the domestic lender of last resort or to domestic deposit insurance. UDROP stands for Universal Debt Rollover Option...

We analyse deflationary bubbles in a model where money is the only financial asset. We show that such bubbles are consistent with the household’s transversality condition if and only if the nominal money stock is falling. Our results are in sharp contrast to those in several prominent...

?This Paper considers monetary policy when the weight policy makers put on output loss relative to inflation is their private information. I show that in the first period of a two-period term, all policy makers but the least inflation averse inflate less – but respond more to shocks – than...

Market interest rates on sovereign debt issued by the 12 Eurozone national governments differ very little from each other, despite the credit ratings of these governments ranging from triple A to single A, and despite significant differences among their objective indicators of fiscal-financial...

This paper looks at how the reputation of a monetary policy-making committee is jointly determined with the reputations of its individual members. I ask whether individuals have more or less incentive to gain a reputation for being tough on inflation when they are part of a group. I examine the...

Recent research in contract theory views ownership as a substitute for complete contracts. In this paper this approach is applied to monetary integration. Countries face a coordination problem when conducting monetary policy: negative spillovers ensure uncoordinated policy generates too high...

There is a small, but growing, economics literature on the importance and effects of having monetary policy made by a committee, rather than by an individual. Complimenting this is an older and larger body of literature on groups in the other social sciences, particular in social psychology....

We consider independent monetary policy committees as a simple way of attaining relatively low inflation without completely sacrificing the stabilization role of monetary policy. If central banker's types are unknown, then for a wide range of parameters an independent monetary policy committee...