A dynamic stochastic model of a small open economy with a two-level banking intermediation structure, a risk-sensitive regulatory capital regime, and imperfect capital mobility is developed. Firms borrow from a domestic bank and the bank borrows on world capital markets, in both cases subject to...

Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We...

Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We...

Colonial Americans complained that gold and silver coins (specie) were chronically scarce. These coins could be acquired only through importation. Given unrestricted trade in specie, market arbitrage should have eliminated chronic scarcity. A model of efficient barter and local inside money is...

Currency substitution affects the mapping between social welfare and inflation by altering the underlying money demand function and influencing interest rates. In order to explore the essence of this effect, I build a model with working capital under which foreign currency is substituted with...

This paper provides an introduction to the special issue “The Crisis in the Euro Area”. We take stock of what the euro area crisis has taught us about monetary integration. At the inception of the euro area in 1999, the main parameters of the theory of monetary integration seemed to have...

The high costs of crises underscore the need to strengthen the resilience of economies, notably by assessing early on potential vulnerabilities that can lead to such costly events. This paper first discusses the source and nature of potential vulnerabilities in OECD countries that can lead to...

The global financial crisis and the high associated costs have revived the academic and policy interest in “early warning indicators” of crises. This paper provides empirical evidence on the usefulness of a new set of vulnerability indicators, proposed in a companion paper (Röhn et al.,...

The global financial crisis highlighted the importance of strengthening the resilience of our economies to adverse shocks. In this paper, we take stock of studies carried out primarily within, but also outside the OECD, to better understand the role of macroeconomic and structural policies in...

In the run-up to the financial crisis, indebtedness of households and non-financial businesses rose to historically high levels in many OECD countries; gross debt of financial companies rose dramatically relative to GDP. Much of the debt accumulation appears to have been based on excessive...