The paper draws lessons from the experience of the past year for the conduct of central banks in the pursuit of macroeconomic and financial stability. Macroeconomic stability is defined as either price stability or as price stability and sustainable output or employment growth. Financial...

The recent financial crisis has shown that financial innovation can have devastating systemic impacts. International standard setters’ and national regulators’ response has been a global concerted effort to overhaul and tighten financial regulations....

The recent financial crisis has shown that financial innovation can have devastating systemic impacts. International standard setters’ and national regulators’ response has been a global concerted effort to overhaul and tighten financial regulations....

The recent crisis underlined that proper estimation of distress-dependence amongst banks in a global system is essential for financial stability assessment. We present a set of banking stability measures embedding banks’ linear (correlation) and nonlinear distress-dependence, and their changes...

The rise of finance in developed economies is, for a part at least, a response to the provision and use of an ever growing volume of productive capital stocks and to the accumulation of an ever growing amount of financial assets, which is its counterpart. It is, however, far from being only a...

We develop a general equilibrium model with nancial frictions in which internal capital (equity capital) and external capital (bank loans) have different rates of return. Financial development raises the rate of return on external capital but has a non-monotonic effect on the rate of return on...

We develop a model of a small open economy with credit market frictions to analyze the consequences of capital account liberalization. We show that financial opening facilitates the inflows of cheap foreign funds and improves production efficiency. Reforms increasing labor market flexibility can...

This paper provides an analysis of co-movements between real and financial variables in three new EU member countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland) and the euro area. It focuses on the co-movement between real credit granted to firms and real industrial output on the one hand, and...

The present paper contributes to the body of knowledge on search frictions in credit markets by demonstrating their ability to explain why the net interest margins of banks behave countercyclically. During periods of expansion, a fall in the net interest margin proceeds from two mechanisms: (i)...

Jim Tobin, who died on March 11, 2002 at the age of 84, was one of giants of economics of the second half of the twentieth century and the greatest macroeconomist of his generation. Tobin’s influence on macroeconomic theory is so pervasive - so much part of our professional ‘acquis’ - that...