Recurrent capital inflows pose important challenges for authorities in emerging market economies seeking to preserve financial stability. Raising interest rates to dampen imbalances that could arise from capital flows can also attract more capital inflows and accentuate appreciation pressures....

Global risk-off shocks can be highly destabilizing for financial markets and, absent an adequate policy response, may trigger severe recessions. Policy responses were more complex for developed economies with very low interest rates after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). We document, however,...

A central proposition in research on the role that banks play in the transmission mechanism is that monetary policy imparts a direct impact on deposits and that deposits, insofar as they constitute the supply of loanable funds, act as the driving force of bank lending. This paper argues that the...

Empirical evidence on whether the euro area monetary transmission process has changed is, at best, mixed. We argue that this inconclusiveness is likely to be due to the fact that existing empirical studies concentrate on the effects of a particular development on a specific transmission channel....

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...

We characterize empirically the financial cycle using two approaches: analysis of turning points and frequency-based filters. We identify the financial cycle with the medium-term component in the joint fluctuations of credit and property prices; equity prices do not fit this picture well. We...

We investigate the performance of different variables as anchors for setting the level of the countercyclical regulatory capital buffer requirements for banks. The gap between the ratio of credit-to-GDP and its long-term backward-looking trend performs best as an indicator for the accumulation...

We assess the long-term economic impact of the new regulatory standards (the Basel III reform), answering the following questions. (1) What is the impact of the reform on long-term economic performance? (2) What is the impact of the reform on economic fluctuations? (3) What is the impact of the...

We study the optimal combination of interest rate policy and unconventional monetary policy in a model where agency costs generate a spread between deposit and lending rates. We show that credit policy can be a powerful substitute for interest rate policy. In the face of shocks that negatively...

As the Basel III package nears completion, the emphasis is shifting to monitoring its implementation and assessing the impact of the reforms. This paper presents a simple conceptual framework to assess the macroeconomic impact of the core Basel III reforms, including the leverage ratio surcharge...