Japan has experienced stagnation, deflation, and low interest rates for decades. It is caught in a liquidity trap. This paper examines Japan's liquidity trap in light of the structure and performance of the country's economy since the onset of stagnation. It also analyzes the country's liquidity...

The paper analyses the empirical relationship between bank risk and sovereign credit risk in the euro area. Using structural VAR with daily financial markets data for 2003-13, the analysis confirms two-way causality between shocks to sovereign risk and bank risk, with the former being overall...

The credit risk of the sovereign affects the financial health of its banking sector and vice versa, creating an adverse feedback loop known as “sovereign- bank nexus”. We show that Quantitative Easing can effectively mitigate the sovereign-bank nexus. Our results indicate that the ECB’s...

Under the current tendency toward excess liquidity, China's monetary policy is becoming more difficult to manage. This paper explains the specific monetary policy tools available to China's central bank, the People's Bank of China (PBC), and also examines how those tools have been used over the...

Standard New Keynesian models predict implausibly large and favorable responses of inflation and output to expansionary forward guidance on interest rates. We find that the introduction of permanent or recurring active fiscal policy dampens the response of output and inflation to forward...

The Global Financial Crisis inaugurated a profoundly transformative period for central banks and their independence. Two decades, with crises alternating with a new normal and eventually resulting in an inflation surge, and with multiple changes in the economic context and the contents and...

We explore the effectiveness and balance of benefits and costs of so-called "unconventional" monetary policy measures extensively implemented in the wake of the financial crisis: balance sheet policies (commonly termed "quantitative easing"), forward guidance and negative policy rates. Our...

This paper presents two issues: First, an effort to decipher the type of economic analysis and macroeconomic policies of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) theoretical and policy framework, which we suggest are essentially of the "new consensus" variety; Second, an argument that the...

There is growing presumption that central banks have a significant role to play in addressing environmental challenges, especially climate change. This article explains, on the basis of both theoretical and empirical evidence, that attempting to use existing central bank powers to tackle climate...

We estimate forward-looking interest-rate rules for five large OECD economies, allowing for time variation in the responses to macroeconomic conditions and in the variance of the policy rate. Conventional constant-parameter reaction functions likely blur the impact of i) model uncertainty, ii)...