The monetary policy committee (MPC) of the Bank of England consists of five internal and four external members. We study the voting record and show that outsiders dissent more often than insiders and tend to prefer lower rates, especially during economic downturns. Moreover, dissents by...

Historically, money growth has played an important role in Swiss monetary policy, until 1999 as a target and from 2000 onwards as an indicator variable. Since the new policy framework focusses on an inflation forecast, the question arises how useful money growth is for predicting future price...

Interest-rate smoothing is traditionally attributed to the gradual adjustment of monetary policy to shocks. Rudebusch (2002) argues that smoothing can also arise spuriously if an autocorrelated variable is incorrectly excluded from the estimated reaction function. This paper presents a model...

This paper studies money demand in Switzerland. While the existing literature typically analyzes post-1973 data, this study uses data covering six decades. We test for cointegration in a system incorporating money, prices, income, a bond yield, and a deposit rate, and find evidence of a single...

This paper considers the effect of systemic financial crises on aggregate consumption. Using a sample of 23 countries over 32 years, we find that consumption growth seems lower during banking crises, crises following credit booms and crises following house price booms. Moreover, the response to...

This paper shows that the Japanese foreign exchange interventions in 2003/04 seem to have lowered long-term interest rates in a wide range of countries, including Japan. It seems that this decline was triggered by the investment of the intervention proceeds in US bonds and that a global...

Dissents in the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) are relatively rare. Is this because policymakers late in the voting order are deterred from dissenting? Dissents became infrequent during Chairman Greenspan's tenure, arguably rejecting his growing influence. We show that policymaker dissents...

During the financial crisis of 2007/08 the level and volatility of interest rate spreads increased dramatically. This paper examines how the choice of the target interest rate for monetary policy affects the volatility of inflation, the output gap and the yield curve. We consider three monetary...