We use data on UK banks’ minimum capital requirements to study the interaction of monetary policy and capital requirement regulation. UK banks were subject to both time-varying capital requirements and changes in interest rate policy. Tightening of either capital requirements or monetary...

This study analyzes key issues associated with large increases in aid, including absorptive capacity, Dutch disease, and inflation. The authors develop a framework that emphasizes the different roles of monetary and fiscal policy and apply it to the recent experience of five countries: Ethiopia,...

External demand was the main driver of growth in Thailand in 2006 and 2007. However, WEO projections indicate moderating foreign demand in 2008, with U.S. growth being revised downwards to reflect the turmoil in housing and credit markets, and high oil prices. While the share of Thai exports to...

We argue that in an economy with downward nominal wage rigidity, the output gap is negative on average. Because it is more difficult to cut wages than to increase them, firms reduce employment more during downturns than they increase employment during expansions. This is demonstrated in a simple...

This note deals with the stability properties of an economy where the central bank is concerned with stock market developments. We introduce a Taylor rule reacting to stock price growth rates along with inflation and output gap in a New-Keynesian setup. We explore the performance of this rule...

This paper analyses systematic monetary policy in a dynamic stochastic menu cost model. The main assumptions are that price setters have to pay small adjustment costs in order to equalize actual and optimal prices whereas the central bank can do so costlessly (by adjusting the money supply) but...

This paper studies the relation between political polarization and delegation of stabilization policy. There is asymmetric information about how the economy works: unlike voters, two political parties know the variance of an employment shock. Prior to an election each party proposes a central...

This paper presents a cointegrated VAR analysis of monetary transmission mechanisms and changes in them after Spain joined the EMS in 1989. Analyses of long-run price homogeneity within the I(2) model turned out to be crucial for understanding the joint behaviour of money, income, prices, and...

The focus is on nominal transmission mechanisms in Italy with special reference to monetary effects and how they have changed with the increased economic integration in Europe and the increased independence of Italian Central Bank. The empirical model investigates the dynamic determination of...