In a series of academic publications, Edward Nelson has contended that from the 1950s until the late 1970s, UK policymakers failed to recognise the primacy of monetary policy in controlling inflation. He argues that the highwater mark of monetary policy neglect occurred in the 1970s. This thesis has been rejected by Duncan Needham who has explored several experiments with monetary policy from the late 1960s and challenged the assertion that the authorities neglected monetary policy during the 1970s. Drawing on evidence from the archives and other sources, this article documents how the UK authorities wrestled with monetary policy following the 1967 devaluation of sterling. Excessive broad money growth during the early 1970s was followed by the highest level of peacetime inflation by 1975. The article shows that despite the experiments with monetary policy, a nonmonetary view of inflation dominated the mindset of policymakers during the first half of the 1970s. In the second half of the 1970s there was a change in emphasis and monetary policy became more prominent in economic policymaking, particularly when money supply targets were introduced. Despite this, the nonmonetary view of inflation dominated the decision processes of policymakers during the 1970s.

How was Romania able to borrow cheaply on the international capital markets before World War I? We explore this within the context of its three southeast European neighbours, Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia, using a novel dataset of monthly bond prices from the Berlin and London stock exchanges. A comparison of country characteristics and panel data analysis suggests that Romania was able to borrow under more favourable conditions due to its abundant natural resources and desirable exports.

This note provides a nontechnical summary of a research paper (Bullard and DiCecio [2021, Classical policy benchmarks for economies with substantial inequality, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, unpublished manuscript]) that I presented as the NIESR 2021 Dow Lecture on 9 February 2021. In the paper, we construct a simple benchmark macroeconomic model with substantial heterogeneity among households, enough to generate empirically plausible Gini coefficients for the distributions of consumption, income and financial wealth. The model includes aggregate shocks as well as both permanent and temporary idiosyncratic uncertainties. Four policymakers—implementing monetary, fiscal, labour market and education policies—act in concert to achieve a first-best allocation of resources. We argue that the roles of these policymaker types are ‘classic’ and match up well with observed policymaker roles in OECD countries. We regard this simple economy as a benchmark for the study of other aspects of the interaction between policy and inequality.

We analyse the money-financed fiscal stimulus implemented in Venice during the famine and plague of 1629–31, which was equivalent to a ‘net-worth helicopter money’ strategy – a monetary expansion generating losses to the issuer. We argue that the strategy aimed at reconciling the need to subsidize inhabitants suffering from containment policies with the desire to prevent an increase in long-term government debt, but it generated much monetary instability and had to be quickly reversed. This episode highlights the redistributive implications of the design of macroeconomic policies and the role of political economy factors in determining such designs.

This paper studies the role of monetary policy for the dynamics of US mortgage debt, which accounts for the largest part of household debt. A time-varying parameter vector autoregressive (VAR) model allows us to study the variation in the sensitivity of mortgage debt to monetary policy. We find that an identically sized policy shock became less effective over time. We use a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to show that a fall in the share of adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) can replicate this finding. Calibrating the model to the drop in the ARM share since the 1980s yields a decline in the sensitivity of housing debt to monetary policy which is quantitatively similar to the VAR results. A sacrifice ratio for mortgage debt reveals that a policy tightening directed toward reducing household debt became more expensive in terms of a loss in employment. Counterfactuals show that this result cannot be attributed to changes in monetary policy itself.

The recession of 1937–8 is often cited as illustrating the dangers of withdrawing fiscal and monetary stimulus too early in a weak recovery. Yet our understanding of this severe downturn is incomplete: existing studies find that changes in fiscal policy were small in comparison to the magnitude of the downturn and that higher reserve requirements were not binding on banks. This article focuses on a neglected change in monetary policy, the sterilization of gold inflows during 1937, and finds that it exerted a powerful contractionary force during this period. The transmission of this monetary shock to the real economy appears to have worked through lower asset (equity) prices and higher interest rates.

This article proposes to insert a bank capital channel (BCC) in the theoretical framework proposed by Bernanke et al. (1999) (BGG), in order 1) to evaluate the mean features of the BCC and 2) to assess the benefits of a countercyclical prudential measure. In a costly state verification framework, banks are charged a financing premium on their external funds which depends on the structure of their balance sheets and which then fluctuates in a counter-cyclical way. This premium is lastly passed on to firms' credit conditions. Simulations confirm that shocks are more amplified than in the BGG model, and confirm the importance of the financial context for macroeconomic volatility. Given the effects of this channel and the ineffectiveness of monetary policy in a capital crunch context, the model finally allows a conclusive evaluation of the advantages associated with a preemptive and counter-cyclical prudential measure in a DSGE model to be made.

In this paper, we study the role of habit formation in accounting for the joint behavior of the real interest rate and consumption growth following a monetary policy shock. A VAR estimation on US data shows that following a contractionary monetary policy shock, the real interest rate exhibits a persistent increase while consumption growth drops persistently. As the standard permanent income model is known to be unable to replicate this co–movement for intertemporal substitution motives, we introduce habit persistence in consumption behavior. We test the implied Euler equation using a method of moments on conditional moments (IRF) obtained from the VAR model. Our estimates of the habit persistence parameter are similar to previous results in the literature. Further, we find empirical support in favor of habit formation as a relevant assumption to represent the joint behavior of the real interest rate and consumption growth following a monetary policy shock. Finally, we show that habit formation allows weakening the intertemporal substitution mechanism.

At the dawn of the 21st century, property and equity ownership are spread more broadly across the population than they once were. One consequence of this is that asset price booms and crashes now have a direct impact on general welfare. The fact that bubbles distort nearly all economic decisions gives policymakers a stronger interest in asset price stability. In this article I examine the theoretical and empirical case for the existence of equity and property bubbles, and then summarise the economic distortions that they create. The evidence suggests increasing our attention to property prices. I go on to discuss the possible policy responses, including examining the consequences of changing the way in which housing is included in standard aggregate price measures.

In contrast to recent successful developments in macro monetary policies, the modelling, measurement and management of systemic financial stability has remained problematical. Indeed, the focus of most effort has been on improving individual, rather than systemic, bank risk management; the Basel II objective has been to bring regulatory bank capital into line with the (sophisticated) banks‘ assessment of their own economic capital. Even at the individual bank level there are concerns over (i) appropriate diversification allowances, (ii) differing objectives of banks and regulators, (iii) the need for a buffer over regulatory minima, and (iv) the distinction between expected and unexpected losses (EL and UL). At the systemic level the quite complex and prescriptive content of Basel II raises dangers of ‘endogenous risk’ and procyclicality. Simulations suggest that this latter could be a serious problem.

Cette étude revient sur la distinction établie entre deux règles de fixation irrévocable des cours de change: une règle temporelle suivant laquelle le gel de la parité est programmé à une date arbitraire; une règle d'état sous laquelle cette décision résulte de l'atteinte d'un seuil par les déterminants fondamentaux. En les replaçant dans un cadre d'analyse commun, ces stratégies apparaisent en fait rigoureusement équivalentes en l'absence d'incertitude sur le déroulement de la transition. Une correspondance en termes probabilistes est établie dans un contexte stochastique plus général. Ce cadre d'analyse unifié s'avère un préalable utile pour entreprendre une relecture de la stratégie maastrichtienne en matière cambiaire et mettre à jour certaines propriétés du scénario finalement adopté par les autorités européennes.