Prevailing explanations of the decline in real interest rates since the early 1980s are premised on the notion that real interest rates are driven by variations in desired saving and investment. But based on data stretching back to 1870 for 19 countries, our systematic analysis casts doubt on...

The existing literature on estimated structural News Driven Business Cycle (NDBC) models has focused almost exclusively on macroeconomic data and has largely ignored asset prices. In this paper, we present evidence that including data on asset prices in the estimation of a structural NDBC model...

It is widely acknowledged that the recent generation of DSGE models failed to incorporate many of the liquidity and financial accelerator mechanisms revealed in the global financial crisis that began in 2007. This paper complements the papers presented at the 2009 BIS annual conference focused...

Over the past 15 years there has been remarkable progress in the specification and estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. Central banks in developed and emerging market economies have become increasingly interested in their usefulness for policy analysis and...

Do housing and equity booms significantly raise the probability of extremely bad outcomes at the margin? This study addresses this question for a group of 8 East Asian countries. The main findings are the following: (i) Asset price booms in housing and equity markets, either separately or...

We propose a regime-switching approach to deal with the lower bound on nominal interest rates in dynamic term structure modelling. In the "lower bound regime", the short term rate is expected to remain constant at levels close to the effective lower bound; in the "normal regime", the short rate...

Based on empirical VAR models, we investigate the role of (option-implied) stock and bond market volatilities and monetary policy in the determination of the US 10-year term premium. Our preliminary findings are that an unexpected loosening of monetary policy - through a cut in the federal funds...

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...

The global financial crisis has reaffirmed the importance of financial factors for macroeconomic fluctuations. Recent work has shown how the conventional pre-crisis prescription that monetary policy should pay no attention to financial variables over and above their effects on inflation may no...

This paper extends the model of Aoki et al. (2009) considering a two sector small open economy. We study the interaction of borrowing, asset prices, and spillovers between tradable and non-tradable sectors. Our results suggest that when it is difficult to enforce debtors to repay their debt...