CEP Discussion Paper No 887 August 2008 Sales and Monetary Policy Bernardo Guimaraes and Kevin Sheedy Abstract A striking fact about prices is the prevalence of ``sales'': large temporary price cuts followed by a return exactly to the former price. This paper builds a...

In financial crises, the premium on liquid assets such as US Treasuries increases alongside credit spreads. This paper explains the link between the liquidity premium and spreads. We present a theory of endogenous bank fragility arising from a coordination friction among bank creditors. The...

If central banks publish the transcripts of their internal policy debates, will discussions be enhanced or inhibited? Michael McMahon and colleagues use tools from computational linguistics to analyse the positive and negative effects of transparency on deliberations of the monetary policymakers...

How does transparency, a key feature of central bank design, affect the deliberation of monetary policymakers? We exploit a natural experiment in the Federal Open Market Committee in 1993 together with computational linguistic models (particularly Latent Dirichlet Allocation) to measure the...

The paper identifies a number of misconceptions about the monetary policy process and the monetary transmission mechanism in the UK. Among the misconceptions about the process are the alleged lack of regional and sectoral representativeness of the Monetary Policy Committee and the view that...