House prices have increased significantly in Canada over the past decade, driving household debt and residential construction activity to historical highs. Although macro-prudential tightening has slowed the pace of household borrowing in the last few years, house prices have continued to trend...

Standard theory predicts that financial integration leads to a lower degree of business cycle synchronization. Surprisingly, cross-country studies find the opposite. Our contribution is to document the theoretically predicted negative effect of financial integration on business cycle...

We present a new agent-based model focusing on the linkage between the interbank market and the real economy with a stylised central bank acting as lender of last resort. Using this model we address the tradeoff between stability and economic performance for different structures of the interbank...

The euro area sovereign debt crisis highlighted important weaknesses in the euro area design. Fiscal policy did not build sufficient buffers before the crisis, which forced some countries to tighten fiscal policy too rapidly during the downturn to restore market confidence in sovereign...

Using cross-country data, this paper estimates the impact of the 2007 financial shock on countries’ macroeconomic developments conditional on national financial regulations before the crisis. For this purpose, the "financial reform index" developed by Abiad et al. (A New Database of Financial...

Using cross-country data, this paper estimates the impact of the 2007 financial shock on countries' macroeconomic developments conditional on national financial regulations before the crisis. For this purpose, the financial reform index developed by Abiad et al. (A New Database of Financial...

In this chapter, we first discuss the limitations of traditional financial advice, which led to the emergence of robo-advising. We then describe the main features of robo-advising and propose a taxonomy of robo-advisors based on four defining dimensions - personalization, discretion,...

Stress tests have become an important component of the supervisory toolkit. However, the extent of disclosure of stress-test results remains controversial. We argue that while stress tests uncover unique information to outsiders — because banks operate in second--best environments with...

Using data on subprime mortgages from ten cities, I examine geographic variation in the effects of prepayment penalties, balloon loans, and reduced documentation on the probabilities of foreclosure and prepayment. Results indicate that across cities, reduced documentation is consistently related...

A fundamental cause of the global financial crisis was excessive maturity mismatch, notably shadow banking holdings of sub-prime MBS and other structured credit instruments and cross-border Euro area interbank lending to the uncompetitive Euro area periphery. The costs of short term funding do...