How do financial development and financial integration interact? We focus on Japan’s Great Recession after 1990 to study this question. Regional differences in banking integration affected how the recession spread across the country: financing frictions for credit-dependent firms were more...

Does international financial integration boost economic growth? The question has been discussed controversially for a long time. As of yet, robust evidence for a positive impact is lacking (Edison et al., 2002). However, there is substantial narrative evidence from economic history that...

This paper proposes a macro-prudential financial soundness analysis that can be used by most developing and transformation countries with or without crisis experience as well as by developed countries with limited data. The objective is to detect economic and financial sector vulnerability,...

Several developing economies witnessed a large number of systemic financial and currency crises since the 1980s which resulted in severe economic, social, and political problems. The devastating impact of the 1982 and 1994-95 Mexican crises, the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, the 1998 Russian...

Many central banks have become more transparent during the last decade, in particular about macroeconomic prospects. This paper shows that such economic transparency could give central banks greater flexibility to respond to macroeconomic shocks. In particular, it allows central banks to...

Central bank credit has expanded dramatically in some of the euro area member countries since the beginning of the financial crisis. This paper makes two contributions to understand this stylized fact. First, we discuss a simple model of monetary policy that includes (i) a credit channel and...

Using voting data from the Bank of England, we show that different individual assessments of the economy strongly influence votes after controlling for individual policy preferences. We estimate that internal members form more precise assessments than externals and are also more hawkish, though...

In this paper we present a three period setup to model central bank forward guidance in a liquidity trap. We analyze the role of long-run and short-run price stickiness under discretion and commitment in a straightforward and intuitive way. Despite the impact of price rigidity on welfare being...

We study how the optimal degree of conservatism relates to decision-making procedures in a Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). In our framework, central bank conservatism is required to attenuate the volatility of monetary decisions generated by the presence of uncertainty about the committee...

We present a simple neoclassical model to explore how an aggregate bank-capital requirement can be used as a macroeconomic policy tool and how this additional tool interacts with monetary policy. Aggregate bank-capital requirements should be adjusted when the economy is hit by cost-push shocks...