We study monetary policy-making in an economy with many sector-specific monopoly unions. It is assumed that the senior union members are in the majority and – due to the practice of lay-offs by inverse seniority – face a lower unemployment risk than the junior members. Consequently, the...

Using the citizen-candidate model, we relate the monetary policy objective to individuals' voting decisions and characterize equilibrium inflation and employment under central bank dependence and independence. We also endogenize the decisions about the labour market distortion and central bank...

We argue that the traditional question 'fixed vs. flexible exchange rates?' is not well-defined, because 'flexible exchange rates' does not explicitly specify any particular monetary policy. In traditional analyses, 'flexible exchange rates' was interpreted as implying a fixed money supply. But...

We propose a flexible majority rule for central bank councils where the size of the majority depends monotonically on the change in interest rate within a particular time frame. Small changes in interest rate require a small share of supporting votes, even less than 50%. We show that flexible...

In this paper we show that the delegation of monetary policy to an independent and more conservative central banker is an optimal policy in an international context with monetary spillovers between countries, even in the absence of time inconsistency (credibility) issues. We also study the...

Monetary arrangements in Europe vacillated wildly over the last decade, and they may be expected to continue to do so over the next. The literature on this chaotic process has focused on issues of credibility. Here, we focus instead on the longer-run implications of Europe's choice of monetary...

As Stage Two of European Monetary Union (EMU) in Europe develops, a major issue is the coordination of monetary policies. Member countries of the European Monetary System (EMS) will have to align their domestic source moneys. This paper argues that for this purpose, the Treasury and central bank...

The paper considers the pros and cons for Canada of monetary union between Canada and the U.S. The current Canadian monetary arrangements, a flexible exchange rate and an inflation target, are contrasted both with a unilateral adoption by Canada of the U.S. dollar and with a full, formally...