This Occasional Paper analyses how significant expansions in central banks' mandates, roles and instruments can result in challenges to the independence of monetary policy. The paper reviews, in particular, some of the key challenges to central bank independence brought about by the global...

This paper analyses the implications of the evidence on micro price setting gathered by Price-setting Microdata Analysis Network (PRISMA) for inflation dynamics and monetary policy, relying on calibrated models and direct empirical evidence. According to models calibrated to the euro area micro...

We show that local central bank policies attenuate global financial cycle (GFC)'s spillovers. For identification, we exploit GFC shocks and Brazilian interventions in FX derivatives using three matched administrative registers: credit, foreign credit flows to banks, and employer-employee. After...

Since the European Central Bank’s (ECB’s) 2003 strategy review, the importance of macro-financial amplification channels for monetary policy has increasingly gained recognition. This paper takes stock of this evolution and discusses the desirability of further incremental enhancements in the...

Since the European Central Bank’s (ECB’s) 2003 strategy review, the importance of macro-financial amplification channels for monetary policy has increasingly gained recognition. This paper takes stock of this evolution and discusses the desirability of further incremental enhancements in the...

We extract tone-adjusted, time-varying and hierarchically ordered topics from a large corpus of Dutch financial news and investigate whether these topics are useful for monitoring the business cycle and nowcasting GDP growth in the Netherlands. The financial newspaper articles span the period...

In addition to its direct effects on the global trading and production structure, the ongoing process of globalisation may have important implications for the interaction of exchange rates and the overall economy. This paper presents evidence regarding possible changes in the role of exchange...

This paper decomposes the time-varying effect of exogenous exchange rate shocks on euro area countries inflation into country-specific (idiosyncratic) and region-wide (common) components. To do so, we propose a flexible empirical framework that is based on dynamic factor models subject to...

Current account imbalances and their sustainability are among the most debated international policy issues. Through the recently designed External Balance Assessment methodology (EBA), the IMF estimates the impact of several countries' fundamentals and policies on their current account balance,...

This paper provides a comprehensive investigation of the determinants of US dollar-denominated long-term debt issuance by European banks. The database used allows the drivers of foreign-currency issuance identified in the literature, including variables at the individual firm (e.g. bank) level,...