Rising economic integration in Asia and periodic volatility in global and national financial markets raise the issue of the optimal degree and form of monetary cooperation among Asian economies. There is a large literature on the benefits and costs of monetary cooperation, however, less can be...

This note presents a simple model that nests the “excess liquidity” and “savings glut” hypotheses of the debate on the recent asset price boom. It clarifies the notion of investors’ ‘search for yield’ and shows how financial frictions influence asset price dynamics.

This paper uses the credit-friction model developed by C´urdia and Woodford, in a series of papers, as the basis for attempting to mimic the behavior of credit spreads in moderate as well as in times of crisis. We are able to generate movements in representative credit spreads that are, at...

We investigate a new source of economic stickiness: namely, staggered loan interest rate contracts under monopolistic competition. The paper introduces this mechanism into a standard New Keynesian model. Simulations show that a response to a financial shock is greatly amplified by the staggered...

This paper estimates a two-country model with a global bank, using US and Euro Area (EA) data, and Bayesian methods. The estimated model matches key US and EA business cycle statistics. Empirically, a model version with a bank capital requirement outperforms a structure without such a...

The blanket guarantee introduced in 1998 in response to the emerging banking and economic crisis resulted in $50 billion of losses to the general public. The government has now introduced a law that enables the phasing out of this blanket guarantee, but which also allows for its reinstatement in...

Policy changes in Indonesian banking from 1983 through 1990 saw the removal of controls on interest rates, lending, and expansion of branch networks, and of barriers to entry. The dismantling of loan subsidy programmes financed by the central bank ran in parallel with these changes. Private...

We document how firm-specific volatility in sales, earnings and employment growth evolved year by year in Japan. Our volatility measure also indicates the evolution of firm turnover. We find that patterns in firm-specific volatility have changed when macroeconomic circumstances have. Firm...

This paper explores the hypothesis that the sources of economic and financial crises differ from non-crisis business cycle fluctuations. We employ Markov-switching Bayesian vector autoregressions (MS-BVARs) to gather evidence about the hypothesis on a long annual U.S. sample running from 1890 to...

This paper amends the New Keynesian Phillips curve model to include inflation volatility and tests the determinants of such volatility for India. It provides results on the determinants of inflation volatility and expected inflation volatility for OLS and ARDL (1,1) models and for change in...