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...

Despite constituting the very heart of the monetary transmission mechanism, widespreadmisconceptions still exist regarding how monetary policy is implemented. This paperhighlights the key misconceptions in this regard and shows how they have compromised theunderstanding of important aspects of...

This paper argues that incorporating information about the financial cycle is important to improve measures of potential output and output gaps. Conceptually, identifying potential output with non-inflationary output is too restrictive. Potential output is seen as sustainable; yet experience...

This paper examines the evolving role of reserve requirements as a policy tool in China. Since 2007, the Chinese central bank (PBC) has relied more on this tool to withdraw domestic liquidity surpluses, as a cheaper substitute for open-market operation instruments in this period of rapid FX...

Global current account imbalances have been at the forefront of policy debates over the past few years. Many observers have recently singled them out as a key factor contributing to the global financial crisis. Current account surpluses in several emerging market economies are said to have...

Monetary policy has been in the grip of a pincer movement, caught between growing financial cycles, on the one hand, and an inflation process that has become quite insensitive to domestic slack, on the other. This two-pronged attack has laid bare some of the limitations of prevailing monetary...

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...

We assess the link between fiscal policy and credit and commodity price booms and busts. We do so by investigating the impact of financial and commodity price cycles on the identification of episodes of fiscal consolidation and stimulus and the size of the fiscal impulse. We find that...

We assess the role of external debt in shaping the dynamics of domestic credit cycles. Using quarterly data for 40 countries between 1980 and 2015, we examine four dimensions of external debt composition: instrument, sector, currency and maturity. We show that the first two dimensions provide...

The paper takes a critical look at the conceptual and empirical underpinnings of prevailing explanations for low real (inflation-adjusted) interest rates over long horizons and finds them incomplete. The role of monetary policy, and its interaction with the financial cycle in particular, deserve...