Federal Reserve purchases of bonds in recent years have meant that a smaller proportion of long-dated government debt has had to be held by other investors (private sector and foreign official institutions). But the US Treasury has been lengthening the maturity of its issuance at the same time....

Does banks' exposure to interest rate risk change when interest rates are very low or even negative? Using a high-frequency event study methodology and intraday data, we find that the effect of surprise interest rate cuts announced by the ECB on European bank equity values - an effect that is...

The Bernanke-Blinder closed economy model suggests that macroprudential policies aimed at bank lending will affect the domestic long-term interest rate. In an open economy, domestic shocks to long-term rates are likely to influence capital flows and the exchange rate. Currency movements feed...

The recent global financial crisis has led central banks to rely heavily on "unconventional" monetary policies. This alternative approach to policy has generated much discussion and a heated and at times confusing debate. The debate has been complicated by the use of different definitions and...

Assigning a discretionary central bank a mandate to stabilize an average inflation rate - rather than a period-by-period inflation rate - increases welfare in a New Keynesian model with an occasionally binding lower bound on nominal interest rates. Under rational expectations, the...

The recent global financial crisis, the Great Recession and the subsequent implementation of a variety of unconventional policy measures have raised the issue of how to correctly measure the stance of monetary policy when policy interest rates reach the zero lower bound (ZLB). In this paper, we...

Have unconventional monetary policies (UMPs) become less effective at stimulating economies in persistently low interest rate environments? This paper examines that question with a time-varying parameter VAR for the United States, the United Kingdom, the euro area and Japan. One advantage of our...