Over the last decade or so, addressing financial instability has risen to the top of the policy agenda. This essay argues that in order to improve the safeguards against financial instability, it may be desirable to strengthen further the macroprudential orientation of current prudential...

Although Central Banks have pursued the same objectives throughout their existence, primarily price and financial stability, the interpretation of their role in doing so has varied. We identify three stable epochs, when such interpretations had stabilised, ie 1. The Victorian era, 1840s to 1914; 2....

This paper extends the approach of measuring and stress-testing the systemic risk of a banking sector in Huang, Zhou, and Zhu (2009) to identifying various sources of financial instability and to allocating systemic risk to individual financial institutions. The systemic risk measure, defined as...

A central proposition in research on the role that banks play in the transmission mechanism is that monetary policy imparts a direct impact on deposits and that deposits, insofar as they constitute the supply of loanable funds, act as the driving force of bank lending. This paper argues that the...

Every financial crisis brings in its wake demands for more information; the latest one is no exception. Because, in deceptively tranquil times, it is well-nigh impossible to foster the consensus necessary to improve data availability, such a window of opportunity must not be missed. To be sure,...

This paper explores the evolving relationship between central banks and governments in the European monetary unification process. In particular, it focuses on the institution-building phase (setting up of the ECB) and the monetary and macro-economic policy mix within EMU. I attribute the...

This paper analyses the determinants of international bank lending to the largest countries in Asia and Latin America through a framework based on "push"/"pull" factors. Our results show that both types of factors determine international bank lending. However, they differ from those of the early...

This paper surveys the institutional and operational features of the six modern currency boards. The survey is developed around three key aspects: organisation, operations and legal foundation. By laying out the facts, this survey seeks to shed light on how and why modern currency boards in...

Prompt Corrective Action (PCA) prescribes prompt and deterministic termination of banks with insufficient levels of book-value capital. This paper investigates whether reliance on book-value capital is a good policy choice and if PCA is an optimal regulatory approach. I use a variant of DeMarzo...

The introduction of a new accounting standard for financial instruments, has raised a number of issues related to the application of fair value principles. This paper discusses some of these issues which are generally related to the fact that "fair values" are not always easily defined or...