This paper reviews the challenges faced by central banks in recent years in order to evaluate their policy implications going forward. To highlight the genuine uncertainty surrounding the lessons to be drawn, the paper examines recent experience through two intentionally polarised perspectives,...

The bulk of cash is held for store of value purposes, with such holdings sharply increasing in times of high economic uncertainty and only a fraction of the population choosing to hoard cash. We develop a Diamond and Dybvig model with public money as a store of value and heterogeneous beliefs...

This paper studies leverage regulation and monetary policy when equity investors and/or creditors have distorted beliefs relative to a planner. We characterize how the optimal leverage regulation responds to arbitrary changes in investors' and creditors' beliefs and relate our results to...

EM Asia has seen a transformation of its monetary policy environment over the past 2 decades. By far, the most relevant change has been the maturing of its financial systems and the growing relevance of the global financial cycle: financial inclusion has spread, financial markets have deepened...

The European Council's decisions to implement the De Larosiere recommendations for a reformed approach to micro-level financial supervision and a new European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB) are to be welcomed. The ECB's central role in the ESRB is also to be welcomed. However, the limited role...

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...

We construct a novel text dataset to measure the sentiment component of communications for 23 central banks over the 2002-2017 period. Our analysis yields three results. First, comovement in sentiment across central banks is not reducible to trade or financial flow exposures. Second, sentiment...