The view that central banks must play a greater role in preserving financial stability has gained considerable ground in the aftermath of the crisis and macroprudential policy has become a central pillar to deal with financial stability. The policy frame of macroprudential policy, its toolbox...

This paper analyses the risk and return of loans portfolios in a joint setting. I develop a model to obtain the distribution of loans returns. I use this model to describe the investment opportunity set of lenders using mean-variance analysis with a Value at Risk constraint. I also obtain closed...

After almost six years with official interest rates at close to zero and with numerous unconventional measures still in place, 2014 is witnessing the beginning of the process of monetary normalisation in those economies, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, in which the recovery...

This document contains the text of the 1998 Central Banking Lecture delivered at the London School of Economics and Political Science on June 4th. It starts by asking what factors have been behind the remarkable retreat of inflation that has taken place internationally since the mid-eighties,...

One of the most striking macroeconomic phenomena in recent decades has been the achievement of rather low and more stable rates inflation in many countries in the nineties. Consequently, the main goal of this paper is to offer an overview of the main policy issues arising in a low inflation...

During the 1970s and early 1980s, Spain suffered high rates of inflation but inflation declined and by 1997 inflation had fallen to approximately 2 percent. To fight inflation, Spain implemented austere monetary programs, joined the EMS in 1989, enacted central bank autonomy in 1994, and...

We construct a model to analyse the two types of tender procedures used by the European Central Bank in its open market operations. We assume that the ECB minimizes the expected value of a loss function that depends on the quadratic difference between the interbank rate and a target interest...

This paper tests two hypotheses for the overbidding behavior of the banks in the fixed rate tenders conducted by the European Central Bank from January 1999 until June 2000. One hypothesis attributes the overbidding to expectations of a future tightening of monetary policy, while the other...

In this paper, we present a monetary policy game in which the central bank has a private forecast of supply and demand shocks. The public needs to form its inflationary expectations and can make use of central bank announcements. However, because of the credibility problem that the central bank...

Inflation-linked bond markets have experienced significant growth in recent years. This growth is somewhat surprising, for inflation-linked bonds cannot be considered a financial innovation and their development has taken place in a period of historically low global inflation and inflation...