The move from individual decision making to committee decision making is widely seen as a major evolution in contemporary central banking. This paper reviews the relevant economics and social psychology literatures with a view to providing some insights into the question of optimal monetary...

This paper formalizes Irving Fisher’s century-old model of bimetallism and adds the important “disequilibrium” dynamics to deal with the long periods during which bimetallic countries were on effective monometallic standards. It resolves a long standing puzzle in the bimetallic literature...

“Co-circulation” involves the regular use of two or more currencies within an economy. This paper examines methodologies to measure the extent to which foreign currencies are circulated within an economy. Ample anecdotal evidence exists that the U.S. dollar, DM, and other currencies are...

Is it beneficial for a country''s currency to be used internationally? And, if so, can we quantify the benefit? Since the emergence of the euro, there has been great interest in the consequences of a transfer of the US dollar''s premier international role to the euro. Building on recent...

As central banks across the globe have responded to the COVID-19 shock by rounds of extensive monetary loosening, concerns about their inequality impact have grown. But rising inequality has multiple causes and its relationship with monetary policy is complex. This paper highlights the channels...

We provide a multidimensional characterization of monetary policy frameworks across three pillars: Independence and Accountability, Policy and Operational Strategy, and Communications (IAPOC). We construct the IAPOC index by analyzing central banks' laws and websites for 50 advanced economies,...

The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and...

Heavy foreign exchange intervention by central banks of emerging markets have lead to sizeable expansions of their balance sheets in recent years?accumulating foreign assets and non-money domestic liabilities (the latter due to sterilization operations). With domestic liabilities being mostly of...

In models with complete markets, targeting core inflation enables monetary policy to maximize welfare by replicating the flexible price equilibrium. We develop a two-sector two-good new-Keynesian model to study the optimal choice of price index in markets with financial frictions. We find that,...