This paper shows how central bank communications can play a role in macroprudential supervision. We document how specific warnings about real estate markets, published in the Central Bank of Chile's Financial Stability Reports of 2012, affected bank lending policies. We provide empirical...

Over the last decade or so, addressing financial instability has become a policy priority. Despite the efforts made, policymakers are still a long way from developing a satisfactory operational framework. A major challenge complicating this task is the "fuzziness" with which financial...

Financial cycles can be important drivers of real activity, but there is scant evidence about how well they signal recession risks. We run a horse race between the term spread - the most widely used indicator in the literature - and a range of financial cycle measures. Unlike most papers, ours...

In addition to leverage, the aggregate debt service burden is an important link between financial and real developments. Using US data from 1985 to 2013, we find that it has sizable negative effects on credit and expenditure growth. Strong interactions between leverage and the debt service...

The credit gap, defined as the deviation of the credit-to-GPD ratio from a Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filtered trend, is a powerful early warning indicator for predicting crises. Basel III therefore suggests that policymakers should use it as part of their countercyclical capital buffer frameworks....

When taking on new debt, borrowers commit to a pre-specified path of future debt service. This implies a predictable lag between credit booms and peaks in debt service which, in a panel of household debt in 17 countries, is four years on average. The lag is driven by two key features of the...

Do the prevailing unusually and persistently low real interest rates reflect a decline in the natural rate of interest as commonly thought? We argue that this is only part of the story. The critical role of financial factors in influencing medium-term economic fluctuations must also be taken...

Funding liquidity risk has played a key role in all historical banking crises. Nevertheless, a measure based on publicly available data remains so far elusive. We address this gap by showing that aggressive bidding at central bank auctions reveals funding liquidity risk. We can extract an...

Over the last decade or so, addressing financial instability has become a policy priority. Despite the efforts made, policymakers are still a long way from developing a satisfactory operational framework. A major challenge complicating this task is the "fuzziness" with which financial...

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...