This paper investigates empirically the implications of delegating monetary policy to a central bank. We argue that the theoretical literature justifying central bank independence is highly stylised and is deficient in three respects: it typically ignores nominal or real rigidities, it assumes there is only a single policy instrument under the control of a single policymaking authority and it t...

A model of a dependent central bank that internalizes the government’s budget constraint is used to examine the optimal composition of the euro zone. The model embodies the desire to stimulate output and to provide monetary financing to governments. Unable to pre-commit to first-best policies, the central bank produces excess inflation — a tendency partially reduced in a monetary union. On the ...

Profit rate stickiness means the asymmetric behavior of banking profit rate with respect to positive and negative shocks. Scrutinizing this behavior would suggest a new perspective on policy tools and banking supervision. In this regard, this paper applies hidden panel cointegration, proposed by Hatemi-J (2018), to study profit rate and bank specific characteristics nexus for all banks listed o...

Inflation targeting has become an increasingly global framework, used by countries of many different types and in all the continents of the world. To assess its global contribution, this paper uses one of the broadest ever surveys of monetary policy frameworks to construct an overall picture from the individual jigsaw pieces of country frameworks. The jigsaw is made up of targets and other meas...

OBJECTIVE Obesity is the single biggest public health threat to developed and developing economies. In concert with healthy public policy, multi-strategy, multi-level community-based initiatives appear promising in preventing obesity, with several countries trialling this approach. In Australia, multiple levels of government have funded and facilitated a range of community-based obesity prevent...

Despite the importance of spike-timing regulation in network functioning, little is known about this regulation at the cellular level. In the Aplysia feeding network, we show that interneuron B65 regulates the timing of the spike initiation of phase-switch neurons B64 and cerebral-buccal interneuron-5/6 (CBI-5/6), and thereby determines the identity of the neuron that acts as a protraction term...