This paper studies the impacts of bank capital regulation on business cycle fluctuations. To do so, we adopt the Bernanke et al. (1999) "financial accelerator" model (BGG), to which we augment a banking sector to study the procyclical nature of Basel II claimed in the literature. We first study...

In 1967 Milton Friedman delivered “The Role of Monetary Policy’ as his presidential address to the American Economic Association (AEA). In its published version – Friedman (1968) – it has become, arguably, the most influential paper in modern monetary economics and was...

This paper introduces heterogeneous beliefs among households in a small open economy model for the Canadian economy. The model suggests that simultaneous boom-bust cycles in house prices, output, investment, consumption and hours worked emerge when credit-constrained mortgage borrowers expect...

This paper analyzes the impact and effectiveness of conventional monetary policy during periods of low and high financial stress in the US economy. Using data from 1973Q1 to 2008Q4, the analysis is conducted by estimating a Threshold Vector Autoregression (TVAR) model to capture switching...

I present a structural econometric analysis supporting the hypothesis that money is still relevant for shaping inflation and output dynamics in the United States. In particular, I find that real money balance effects are quantitatively important, although smaller than they used to be in the...

There appears to be a disconnect between the importance of the zero bound on nominal interest rates in the real-world and predictions from quantitative DSGE models. Recent economic events have reinforced the relevance of the zero bound for monetary policy whereas quantitative models suggest that...

In this paper, we aim to understand how monetary policy is conducted in China and what the main sources of fluctuations in China’s business cycle are. To this end, we extend a standard New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with financial frictions and investment-specific...

We examine the properties of house price fluctuations across 18 advanced economies over the past 40 years. We ask two specific questions: First, how synchronized are housing cycles across these countries? Second, what are the main shocks driving movements in global house prices? To address these...

Estimates of the output gap are an important component of policy-makers’ toolkits. Both the theory underlying monetary policy analysis and the empirical models employed by central banks suggest that the output gap is a key variable explaining inflation. In this view, the estimate of the...