This paper provides some general lessons for the design of counter-cyclical capital buffers. Its main empirical contribution is to analyze conditioning variables which could guide the build-up and release of capital. A major distinction for counter-cyclical capital schemes is whether...

It is high time we rediscovered the role of the financial cycle in macroeconomics. In the environment that has prevailed for at least three decades now, it is not possible to understand business fluctuations and the corresponding analytical and policy challenges without understanding the...

The recent financial crisis has triggered a major rethink of analytical approaches and policy towards financial stability. The crisis has encouraged a sharper focus on systemic risk, the inclusion of a financial sector in macroeconomic models, a shift from a microprudential to a macroprudential...

We compare and contrast two prominent notions of financial cycles: a domestic variant, which focuses on how financial conditions within individual economies lead to boom-bust cycles there; and a global variant, which highlights how global financial conditions affect individual economies. The two...

This paper reviews post-crisis financial regulatory reforms, examines how they fit together and identifies open issues. Specifically, it takes stock of the salient new features of bank and CCP international standards within a unified analytical framework. The key notion in this framework is...

Since the Great Financial Crisis, central banks have been facing a triple challenge: economic, intellectual and institutional. The institutional challenge is that central bank independence - a valuable institution - has come in for greater criticism. This essay takes a historical perspective and...

Few areas of monetary economics have been studied as extensively as the transmission mechanism. The literature on this topic has evolved substantially over the years, following the waxing and waning of conceptual frameworks and the changing characteristics of the financial system. In this paper,...

In analyzing the performance of the international monetary and financial system (IMFS), too much attention has been paid to the current account and far too little to the capital account. This is true of both formal analytical models and historical narratives. This approach may be reasonable when...