Was UK inflation more stable and/or less uncertain before 1914 or after 1945? We address these questions by estimating a statistical model with changing volatilities in transient and persistent components of inflation. Three conclusions emerge. First, since periods of high and low volatility...

By extending his data, we document the instability of low-frequency regression coefficients that Lucas (1980) used to express the quantity theory of money. We impute the differences in these regression coefficients to differences in monetary policies across periods. A DSGE model estimated over a...

This paper looks at the voting patterns of internal and external members of the MPC to investigate how far there are differences between insiders and outsiders. We make three contributions. First, we assess the extent to which the Bank of England internally generated forecasts explain the MPC...

The dynamics of the US economy are modelled using a time-varying structural vector autoregression that incorporates information from the yield curve. We find important changes in the dynamics of macroeconomic variables such as inflation and the federal funds rate. In addition our results suggest...

To detect the quantity theory of money, we follow Lucas (1980) by looking at scatter plots of filtered time series of inflation and money growth rates and interest rates and money growth rates. Like Whiteman (1984), we relate those scatter plots to sums of two-sided distributed lag coefficients...

Using a structural VAR with time-varying parameters and stochastic volatility on post-WWII U.S. data, we document a striking negative correlation between the evolution of the long-run coefficient on inflation in the monetary rule and the evolution of the persistence and predictability of...

The Fed closely monitors the stock market and the stock market continuously forms expectations about the Fed decisions. What does this imply for the relation between the fed funds rate and the S&P500? We find that the answer depends on the conditions prevailing on the financial market. During...

Most analyses of the U.S. Great Moderation have been based on VAR methods, and have consistently pointed toward good luck as the main explanation for the greater macroeconomic stability of recent years. Using data generated by a New-Keynesian model in which the only source of change is the move...

This paper uses mortgage data to construct a measure of terms on which households access to external finance, and relates it to consumption at both the aggregate and cohort levels. The Household External Finance (HEF) index is based on the spread paid by risky borrowers in the mortgage market....

This paper uses mortgage data to construct a measure of terms on which households access to external finance, and relates it to consumption at both the aggregate and cohort levels. The Household External Finance (HEF) index is based on the spread paid by risky borrowers in the mortgage market....