In the course of the last year or so, the Bank of England has come under pressure to raise interest rates on the grounds that a ‘lax’ monetary policy in the face of persistent overshoots of the inflation target risks undermining the Bank’s hard-won credibility. Using the Bayesian as well...

The few papers that explore different ways to measure shipping freight dynamics have differed in their interpretation of the most suitable measure for conditional freight volatility and consequently for the most appropriate freight risk measure. Furthermore, recent empirical work in maritime...

This paper investigates the relationship between credit risk and liquidity components in the interbank spread and how this relationship unfolded during the recent financial crisis. We find that prior to the central bank’s Bank of England’s intervention counterpart risk was a major factor in...

In the last fifteen years or so the conduct of monetary policy in developed economies has converged in a number of ways which include an increasing emphasis on ‘openness’ and ‘transparency’ in policy-making. There is a widespread belief that transparency in the conduct of UK monetary...

It is widely believed that institutional arrangements influence the quality of monetary policy outcomes. Judged on its ‘transparency’ characteristics, therefore the Bank of England should do better than both the Bundesbank and ECB. However, studies based on market evidence show that on...

The last fifteen years have seen the emergence of widespread consensus that optimum monetary policy is designed on the basis of three pillars: a short-term official rate of interest as the sole policy instrument and the placing of that instrument in the hands of a central bank which is (a)...

It is widely believed that institutional arrangements influence the quality of monetary policy outcomes. Judged on its ‘transparency’ characteristics, therefore the Bank of England should do better than the Bundesbank/ECB. We show that this is not confirmed by agents’ ability to anticipate...

It is widely believed that monetary policy outcomes are generally enhanced if the conduct of policy by the central bank is widely understood by other agents in the economy. This widespread belief has given rise to a number of attempts to measure the ‘transparency’ of monetary policy in...