This document contains the text of the 1998 Central Banking Lecture delivered at the London School of Economics and Political Science on June 4th. It starts by asking what factors have been behind the remarkable retreat of inflation that has taken place internationally since the mid-eighties,...

Since the late eighties, the Spanish banking system has been undergoing major changes that have affected both its structure and the nature of strategic interaction among banking institutions. Various different strategies have been adopted to tackle the demands of this new operating environment,...

As the Spanish economy gets more integrated in international markets, competitiveness becomes a key determinant of the monetary transmission. In this paper we trace out the dynamic response of prices, output and the exchange rate following a monetary policy shock. We estimate a structural VAR...

This paper is an attempt to provide an updated assessment of what we know and what do not know about the impact of monetary policy on the economy and what implications follow for the conduct of monetary policy in today's world. Firstly, we discuss the conditions under which monetary policy can...

This paper develops the "identified VAR" models of France and Spain with German monetary variables to identify monetary policy shocks during the period when the exchange rate is controlled mostly by the ERM. Different identifying assumptions on the contemporaneous policy interactions are...

This paper forms part of the research on the transmission of monetary policy via the interest rates of Spanish banks and savings banks, analysed from a disaggregated perspective. In this respect, it considers structural factors that cannot be taken into account in more aggregated studies, as for...

The ECB has still not decided which monetary policy strategy to pursue from 1999. However, the preparatory work has reduced the possible alternatives to two: a strategy of intermediate objectives fixed in terms of the quantity of money and a direct inflation targeting strategy. It would be also...

The paper addresses the issue of the role of exchange rate jumps. The short-run dynamics of the peseta's effective exchange rate vis-a- vis OECD countries over the period 1974:1 - 1995:9 is estimated using a PPP-based error-correction model enlarged with additional terms allowing for the...

During the 1970s and early 1980s, Spain suffered high rates of inflation but inflation declined and by 1997 inflation had fallen to approximately 2 percent. To fight inflation, Spain implemented austere monetary programs, joined the EMS in 1989, enacted central bank autonomy in 1994, and...

In this paper, the role of the financial position of private agents in the transmission of monetary policy (the balance-sheet channel) is explored. To the extent that official interest rates are able to affect the market value and the income flows of certain categories of financial instruments...