A frequently neglected aspect of financial booms and busts - financial cycles - is their impact on fiscal positions. And yet, the latest financial crisis and history show that these cycles can wreak havoc with public finances. After reviewing the impact of financial cycles on fiscal positions,...

The paper analyses and compares the domestic and cross-border effects of US and euro area unconventional monetary policy measures on 24 major advanced and emerging economies, based on an estimated global vector error-correction model (GVECM). Unconventional monetary policies are measured using...

This paper investigates the overall effect of the European Central Bank's (ECB's) unconventional monetary policies (UMPs) implemented since 2008 on euro area bank retail lending and deposit rates offered to households and non-financial corporations. To do so, we use an analytical approach that...

The recent global financial crisis, the Great Recession and the subsequent implementation of a variety of unconventional policy measures have raised the issue of how to correctly measure the stance of monetary policy when policy interest rates reach the zero lower bound (ZLB). In this paper, we...

How do monetary policy spillovers complicate the trade-offs faced by central banks face when responding to commodity prices? This question takes on particular relevance when monetary authorities find it difficult to accurately diagnose the drivers of commodity prices. If monetary authorities...

The global finance crisis prompted central banks in many countries to cut short-term policy rates to near zero levels. Yet, lending rates did not fall as much as the decline in policy rates would have suggested. We argue that comparing lending rates to policy rates is misleading: banks do not...

Central banks of major advanced economies have maintained a very accommodative monetary policy stance in the last few years. However, concerns have surfaced that the transmission of low policy rates to lending rates has been weaker than in the past. Has the transmission of policy rates to...

Motivated by the traditional business cycle approach of Burns and Mitchell (1946), we explore cyclical similarities in financial conditions over time in order to improve our understanding of financial cycles. Looking back at 120 years of data, we find that financial cycles exhibit behaviour...