This paper investigates whether credit booms are an important warning signal for banking crises in Asian and Latin American emerging market economies. Based on a signalling leading indicator model, the results suggest that credit booms are indeed a prelude for banking crises, especially in Latin...

We investigate whether the anchoring properties of long-run inflation expectations in the United States, the euro area and the United Kingdom have changed around the economic crisis that erupted in mid-2007. We document that in these three economies, expectations measures extracted from...

Survey evidence indicates that inflation expectations increased after HICP inflation rose markedly in the course of 2007 and the first half of 2008, underpinning a general view that inflation expectations may have become unanchored from the ECB's target. However, until now there has been no...

The volatility of unanticipated output growth in income per capita is detrimental to long-run development, controlling for initial income per capita, population growth, human capital, investment, openness and natural resource dependence. This effect is significant and robust over a wide range of...

During the Great Crisis, most governments in industrial countries supported their domestic financial sector under stress and responded to strong declines in output growth with fiscal stimulus packages. Starting in 2010, attention focused on the sustainability of the resulting debt burdens. We...

We study the effects of Central Bank transparency on inflation and the output gap. We thus identify a small analytical model which concludes that transparency affects the variability of inflation and output and not their average levels. Then we examine whether this conjecture holds empirically,...

We provide a framework for analysing the choice between optimal and robust rules in the presence of paradigm uncertainty in monetary policy. We thus provide two issues: first, we discuss the conditions of uncertainty that render a robust rule a preferable substitute to optimal rules and second,...

The independent nature of the Central Bank is often associated with achieving low and stable inflation. Further to that the merits of independence are stretched to achieving low(er) output variability when compared to a government run monetary policy. In this paper we use the Alesina and Alesina...