In the wake of the Great Recession, a massive monetary policy stimulus was provided in the main OECD economies. It helped to stabilise financial markets and avoid deflation. Nonetheless, GDP growth has been sluggish and in some countries lower than expected given the measures taken, and...

How far to go – and to remain – in the direction of highly expansionary monetary policy hinges on the balance of marginal benefits and costs of additional monetary easing and its expected evolution over time. This paper sketches a framework for assessing this balance and applies it to four...

Turkey has considerably improved its terms of access to the global capital market. Progress in macroeconomic fundamentals has enhanced credibility and reduced risk premia and capital costs. This has had broad effects on capital supply conditions in the entire economy. Real interest rates have...

This paper addresses the question of whether and how long-term financial trends may have modified the transmission mechanism from monetary policy decisions to economic activity. The focus is on longterm changes, abstracting from the disruptions created by the 2007-08 financial turmoil which are...

This paper documents some features of recent trends in bond yields and discusses the drivers of these trends. This includes a discussion of the relationship between fiscal balances and interest rates -- with a summary of key empirical results from the literature provided in the Appendix. The...

This study analyses the impact of economic catching-up on annual inflation rates in the European Union with a special focus on the new member countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Using an array of estimation methods, we show that the Balassa-Samuelson effect is not an important driver of...

This paper analyses recent large movements in the yield spread for sovereign bonds as between Germany and other euro area countries. While the general increase in risk aversion that has characterised the financial crisis is an important factor on its own, it is found that this has also magnified...

This paper estimates potential output losses from the global financial crisis by comparing recent OECD published projections with a counter-factual assuming a continuation of pre-crisis productivity trends and a trend employment rate which is sensitive to demographic trends. Among the 19 OECD...

Using a large panel of OECD countries this paper studies the link between debt and macroeconomic stability by comparing the evolution of balance sheet aggregates and economic output in high- and lowdebt environments. While the relationship between debt and economic growth has been extensively...

This paper investigates the existence of significant spillovers from the housing sector onto the wider economy for the seven major OECD countries using Uhlig's (2005) agnostic identification procedure. This method allows a housing demand shock to be identified in a six-variable VAR model by...