This paper re-examines the findings of Alogoskoufis and Smith (1991), who argue that sharp increases in inflation persistence can be attributed to changes in the exchange rate regime. Using long time series data from the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Sweden, we suggest that these...

This paper discusses the short-run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment. Although this tradeoff remains a necessary building block of business cycle theory, economists have yet to provide a completely satisfactory explanation for it.

The paper analyzes the problems of inflation finance in economies in transition from plan to market, when there are complications due to the use of money creation to finance credit to productive enterprises.

Inflation appears to be the macro-problem in Ghana for which no antidote has been found under the economic recovery programme. It is possible that either a wrong diagnosis has been made of the problem, or that certain factors within the economy are preventing inflation from staying within target...

In a simple overlapping generations set-up, faster nominal money growth is found to squeeze labour and divert savings towards physical capital. Its net effect on both output and welfare is ambiguous. The main variable that can resolve these ambiguities is the profit share in income: the lower...

We test the Barro-Gordon model extended to allow for persistence in unemployment. First, we build an index of central bank independence and measures of persistence, and then we compare them with inflation performance in OECD countries. Our results show, as theory predicts, a robust negative...

This document contains the text of the 1998 Central Banking Lecture delivered at the London School of Economics and Political Science on June 4th. It starts by asking what factors have been behind the remarkable retreat of inflation that has taken place internationally since the mid-eighties,...

This paper studies two aspects of the behaviour of provincial relative prices in Spain: the relevance and the nature of provincial inflation divergences and relative price shifts. Inflation differentials are found to be small (the range is less than half point per year in the long-run), but...

One of the most significant economic developments of recent years in industrialized countries has been the increasing orientation of macroeconomic policies - and of monetary policies in particular - to achieving lower inflation rates. This has led to a move from low inflation to price stability...

We use an integrated framework based on the CCAPM to jointly estimate ex-ante real interest rates, inflation risk premia and agents' inflation expectation errors in four countries - France, Spain, UK and US - under three different preference specifications.