The monetary transmission mechanism describes the channels through which changes in monetary policy affect the policy target, price inflation. Understanding the transmission mechanism is thus central to the successful conduct of monetary policy. This paper uses a Vector AutoRegressive (VAR)...

A monetary economy comprises a vast array of market-clearing interest rates. Central banks exert a direct influence over only a narrow subset of these rates: the rate at which they supply marginal funds to the commercial banking system. Accordingly, the market interest rates which impinge upon...

Why have central banks become more accountable and transparent in recent years? This paper considers a set of analytical models of monetary policy institutions to shed light on this. One conclusion it reaches is that uncertainty - regarding the central bank's inflation preferences or about the...

Since February 2003 a number of debtor countries have issued bonds with collective action clauses (CACs) under New York law - a development welcomed by the official sector as tangible progress towards more orderly crisis resolution. Not all of these countries, however, have opted for the same...

Existing empirical evidence on the effects of IMF intervention on debtor and creditor incentives - so-called moral hazard - is mixed. We develop a new test of creditor moral hazard which uses some new data and some more stringent identifying restrictions. The test examines the response of the...

This paper discusses some of the operational issues relevant to the implementation of an inflation-targeting regime. In particular it focuses on: whether inflation targeting is 'new'; whether (and how) the forward-looking nature of inflation-targeting helps to prevent instabilities in inflation;...

In this paper we explore both theoretical and empirical evidence on communication with the general public. The model provides guidance for policymakers by highlighting some potentially important risks in communicating simply with a broader audience. In particular, in a model where trust and...

In this paper, we use micro-data from the UK Labour Force Survey to estimate unconditional and conditional pay gaps for gender and ethnicity groups since the mid-90s. Both types of gender pay gap have decreased over the sample, but remain in double digits. For ethnicity, the unconditional pay...

In this paper we explore the link between monetary policy and market power. We start by establishing several facts on market power in UK markets using micro data. First, while no clear trend emerges for market concentration, market power measured by markups estimated at the firm level have...