entral banks provide liquidity in various contexts to promote the stability and efficient functioning of the financial system. While the exact institutional aspects of liquidity provision vary among central banks, some basic features seem to be generic. First, the provision of central bank liquidity in normal periods is restricted to a small subset of possible agents who are encouraged to compe...

It is a great pleasure to be here in Kuala Lumpur at this celebration of Bank Negara Malaysia’s 50th Anniversary. The two central banks actually have something of a shared history. In the late 1950s, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, as Australia’s central bank was then known, seconded officers to assist with the establishment of Bank Negara. One of them, Tan Sri WH Wilcock, became Bank Negar...

Beginning with the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act of 1989, central banking reforms have focused on assigning clear goals for which monetary policy authorities can be held accountable. Inflation targeting regimes provide examples of such goal-based policy frameworks. An alternative approach, recently argued for by John Taylor (2012, 2014), relies on a rule-based framework in which the policy au...

A model is constructed in which consumers and banks have incentives to fake the quality of collateral. Conventional monetary easing can exacerbate these problems, in that the mispresentation of collateral becomes more profitable, thus increasing haircuts and interest rate differentials. Central bank purchases of private mortgages may not be feasible, due to misrepresentation of asset quality. I...

The Federal Reserve wanted to use RSS to represent not only news, such as press releases, but also data, such as exchange rates. The Fed hoped to use one set of feeds to accommodate two different audiences for RSS, human readers (at one remove) and self-contained automated processes. While the different RSS specifications provide elements for traditional news items, they require extensions to h...

This paper takes the parameters in central bank loss functions as fundamental preferences to be estimated from the data. It is these preferences (along with target values) that define the policy regime in operation and that potentially change with senior central bank appointments. Optimizing central banks apply policy rules whose feedback coefficients are functions of its preferences. Consequen...

for helpful comments on an earlier draft, without implicating any of them in the views expressed here. I would also like to thank Mauro Roca for research assistance and the National Science Foundation for research support through a grant to the NBER.

Monetary policy objectives and targets are not necessarily constant over time. The regime-switching literature has typically analyzed and interpreted changes in policymakers’ behavior through simple interest rate rules. This paper analyzes policy regime-switches by explicitly modeling policymakers’ behavior and objectives. We show that changes in the parameters of simple rules do not necessaril...