The ongoing financial crisis is shaking central bankers’ certainties about their mission, and a rethinking of such mission can greatly benefit from a non-finalistic reassessment of how central banking has evolved over the centuries. This paper does so by taking a functional, instead of an...

In this paper we use U.S. real-time vintage data and produce combined density nowcasts for quarterly GDP growth from a system of three commonly used model classes. The density nowcasts are combined in two steps. First, a wide selection of individual models within each model class are combined...

This article surveys the degree of central bank independence in Norway between 1945 and 1970. By comparing the developments in Norway with those of Sweden and the United Kingdom, it is shown that the Norwegian central bank had less room for maneuver than in the other countries. In spite of a...

How should monetary policy respond to a commodity price shock in a resource-rich economy? We study optimal monetary policy in a simple model of an oil exporting economy to provide a first answer to this question. The central bank faces a trade-off between the stabilization of domestic inflation...

We study the interaction between monetary policy and household debt dynamics. To this end, we develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model where household debt is amortized gradually, and only new loans are constrained by the current value of collateral. Long-term debt implies that...

Do central banks respond to exchange rate movements? According to Lubik and Schorfheide (2007) who estimate structural general equilibrium models with monetary policy rules, the answer is "Yes, some do". However, their analysis is based on a sample with multiple regime changes, which may bias...

Progress on the question of whether policymakers should respond directly to financial variables requires a realistic economic model that captures the links between asset prices, credit expansion, and real economic activity. Standard DSGE models with fully-rational expectations have difficulty...

This paper studies the microfoundations of the so-called “gold device” policy by analysing a new dataset on the Bank of England’s operations in the gold market at the heyday of the classical gold standard. It explains that “gold devices” must be understood in connection to the Bank’s...

This paper explores if economic uncertainty alters the macroeconomic influence of monetary policy. We consider several measures of U.S. economic uncertainty, and estimate their interaction effects with monetary policy shocks as identified through structural vector autoregressions. We find that...

This paper examines the impact of different types of oil price shocks on the U.S. economy, using a factor-augmented VAR (FAVAR) approach. The results indicate that when examining the effects of oil price shocks, it is important to account for the interaction between the oil market and the...