Using a panel of 40 EU and OECD countries for the period 1970-2010 we construct an early warning system. The system consists of a discrete and a continuous model. In the discrete model, we collect an extensive database of various types of economic crises called CDEC 40-40 and examine potential...

This paper examines the potential for contagion within the Czech banking system via the channel of interbank exposures of domestic banks enriched by a liquidity channel and an asset price channel over the period March 2007 to June 2012. A computational model is used to assess the resilience of...

We identify a set of "rules of thumb" that characterise economic, financial and structural conditions preceding the onset of banking and currency crises in 36 advanced economies over 1970–2010. We use the Classification and Regression Tree methodology (CART) and its Random Forest (RF)...

We explore the ability of a macroprudential policy instrument to dampen the consequences of equity mispricing (a bubble) and the correction thereof (the bubble bursting), as well as the consequences for real activity in a production economy. In our model, producers are financed by both bank debt...

Excessive credit growth is often considered to be an indicator of future problems in the financial sector. This paper examines the issue of how to determine whether the observed level of private sector credit is excessive in the context of the “countercyclical capital bufferâ€, a...

This study investigates the dynamic behavior of the sovereign CDS term premium for a group of European countries. The CDS term premium can be regarded as a forward-looking measure of idiosyncratic sovereign default risk as perceived by financial markets in real time. Using a Markov-switching...

A sharp increase in unemployment accompanied by a relatively muted response of inflation during the Great Recession cast further doubts on the validity of the Phillips curve. With the aid of dynamic model averaging (Raftery et al., 2010), this paper aims to highlight that the existence of a...

We examine whether and how selected central banks responded to episodes of financial stress over the last three decades. We employ a new monetary-policy rule estimation methodology which allows for time-varying response coefficients and corrects for endogeneity. This flexible framework applied...

This paper contributes to a better understanding of how inflation targets are set. First, we gather evidence on how inflation targets are set from official central bank and government publications and from a questionnaire of our own design. Second, we estimate the determinants of the level of...

This paper reviews price-level targeting in the light of current theoretical knowledge and past practical experience. We discuss progress in the economic debate on this issue, starting with the traditional arguments discussed in the early 1990s, moving to Svensson’s seminal paper in the...