This paper contributes to the literature on the properties of money and creditindicators for detecting asset price misalignments. After a review of the evidence inthe literature on this issue, the paper discusses the approaches that can be consideredto detect asset price busts. Considering a...

A striking and unexpected feature of the financial crisis has been the sharpappreciation of the US dollar against virtually all currencies globally. The paper findsthat negative US-specific macroeconomic shocks during the crisis have triggered asignificant strengthening of the US dollar, rather...

Liquidity provision through its repo auctions has been one of the main instrumentsof the European Central Bank (ECB) to address the recent tensions infinancial markets since summer 2007. In this paper, we analyse banks’ biddingbehaviour in the ECB’s main refinancing operations (MROs) during...

This paper tests financial contagion due to interbank linkages. For identification we exploit an idiosyncratic, sudden shock caused by a large-bank failure in conjunction with detailed data on interbank exposures. First, we find robust evidence that higher interbank exposure to the failed bank...

We use a panel of quarterly time series observations on Finnish banks to estimate reduced form equations for the growth rate of bank loans. By allowing for individual bank specific effects in the empirical models we specifically seek evidence of a bank-lending channel for the transmission of...

The Euro Plus Pact was approved by 23 EU countries in March 2011 and came into force shortly afterwards. The Pact stipulates a range of quantitative targets meant to strengthen cost competitiveness with the aim of preventing the accumulation of external financial imbalances. This paper uses...

We investigate the effect of securitization activity on banks’ lending standards using evidence from pricing behavior on the syndicated loan market. We find that banks more active at originating asset-backed securities are also more aggressive on their loan pricing practices. This suggests...

Using the 2007-2009 financial crisis as a laboratory, we analyze the transmission of crises to country-industry equity portfolios in 55 countries. We use an asset pricing framework with global and local factors to predict crisis returns, defining unexplained increases in factor loadings as...

The economics profession in general, and economic forecasters in particular, have faced some understandable criticism for their failure to predict the timing and severity of the recent economic crisis. In this paper, we offer some assessment of the performance of the Economic Analysis conducted...

We explore a view of the crisis as a shock to investor sentiment that led to the collapse of a bubble or pyramid scheme in financial markets. We embed this view in a standard model of the financial accelerator and explore its empirical and policy implications. In particular, we show how the...