We study the specific corporate governance problems of central banks in their complex role of inflation guardians, bankers’ banks, financial industry regulators/supervisors and, in some cases, competition authorities and deposit insurance agencies. We review the current institutional...

Market distress can be the catalyst of a deleveraging wave, as in the 2007/08 financial crisis. This paper demonstrates how market distress and deleveraging can fuel each other in the presence of adverse selection problems in asset markets. At the core of the detrimental feedback loop is agents'...

We propose to incorporate cross-sectional heterogeneity into structural VARs. Heterogeneity provides an additional dimension along which one can identify structural shocks and perform hypothesis tests. We provide an application to bank runs, based on microeconomic deposit market data. We impose...

Using Swedish bank lending data, investment data and accounting data, I examine how the financial crisis affected corporate investment through its effect on credit availability. Sensitivity to a credit supply shock is measured as credit reserves, defined as unused credit on lines of credit. I...

Using panel data of 68,800 small and large firms, I examine whether firms are subject to shifts in the supply of credit over the business cycle. Shifts in the supply of credit are identified by exploring how firms substitute between commitment credit - lines of credit - and non-commitment...

A financial crisis in one region is a wake-up call for investors in other regions. If the correlation across regional fundamentals is potentially positive but uncertain ex-ante, investors acquire information about this correlation to determine their exposure. Financial contagion can occur in the...

We analyze the performance and robustness of some common simple rules for monetary policy in a New-Keynesian open economy model under different assumptions about the exchange rate model. Adding the exchange rate to an optimized Taylor rule gives only small improvements in terms of economic...

This paper reports and analyzes the results from a questionnaire sent to all present and former members of the Riksbank’s Executive Board, the monetary policy committee (MPC) of the Swedish central bank. The questions cover a number of issues discussed in the growing literature on monetary...

I compare nominal GDP level targeting to flexible inflation targeting in a small New Keynesian model subject to the zero lower bound on nominal policy rates. First, I study the performance of optimal discretionary policies. I find that, for a standard calibration, inflation targeting under...