A new perspective is provided on a puzzle that has emerged from the empirical lit- erature suggesting that government-independent central banks provide a `free lunch': lower in°ation is apparently achieved at no cost in terms of greater output variance. We assess the various explanations...

This paper explores the similarity of the underlying economic problems that lead to the establishment of (a) independent central banks to operate national monetary policies and (b) independent regulatory agencies for telecommunications and other utility service industries. We show that, in both...

We present a model of transnational terrorism where two countries, home and foreign, face a terrorist threat based in the foreign country. The home country chooses how much to invest in defending itself or in reducing terrorist resources either indirectly by subsidising the foreign country or by...

This note reassesses the basic result in Mukhopadhaya (2003) that, when jurors may acquire costly signals about a defendant’s guilt, with a larger jury size the probability of reaching a correct verdict may in fact fall, contrary to the Condorcet Jury Theorem. We show that if the jurors...

We reassess the gains from monetary policy coordination within the confines of the canonical NOEM in the light of three issues. First, the literature uses a number of cooperative and non-cooperative equilibrium concepts that do not always clearly distinguish commitment and discretionary...

The paper examines the interrelationship between fiscal and monetary policy in a two-country monetary union. The worst scenario occurs when an independent central bank (CB sets the nominal interest rate and responds to rising government debt/GDP ratios by monetisation. The result is high...

We consider a dynamic model of price regulation with asymmetric information where strategic delegation is available to the regulator. Firms can sink non-contractible, cost-reducing investment but regulators cannot commit to future price levels. We fully characterise the perfect Bayesian...

Bayesian estimation is employed to investigate whether deep as opposed to superficial habit improves the fit of a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. If the stock of superficial habit features the additional persistence typical of deep habit, the two specifications are virtually as...

This paper contributes to an emerging literature that brings the constant elasticity of substitution (CES) specification of the production function into the analysis of business cycle fluctuations. Using US data, we estimate by Bayesian methods a medium-sized DSGE model with a CES rather than...

We present a model of transnational terrorism where two countries, home and foreign, face a terrorist threat based in the foreign country. The home country chooses how much to invest in defending itself or in reducing terrorist resources either indirectly by subsidising the foreign country or by...