Motivated by the traditional business cycle approach of Burns and Mitchell (1946), we explore cyclical similarities in financial conditions over time in order to improve our understanding of financial cycles. Looking back at 120 years of data, we find that financial cycles exhibit behaviour...

We use daily transactional ledger data from the Bank of England's Archive to test whether and to what extent the Bank of England during the mid-nineteenth century adhered to Walter Bagehot's rule that a central bank in a financial crisis should lend cash freely at a penalty rate in exchange for...

We construct an overlapping generations macroeconomic model with which to study the causes, consequences and remedies to ‘credit traps' — prolonged periods of stagnant real activity accompanied by low productivity, financial sector undercapitalisation, and the misallocation of credit. In our...

This paper explores monetary-macroprudential policy interactions in a simple, calibrated New Keynesian model incorporating the possibility of a credit boom precipitating a financial crisis and a loss function reflecting financial stability considerations. Deploying the countercyclical capital...

This paper investigates whether movements in the Bank of England's interest rate hindered the development of the United States by transmitting or amplifying crises during the first age of financial globalisation. Evidence that US monetary and financial developments entered into the Bank's...

Within-firm variation of corporate bond spreads around the Covid-19 outbreak shows that US dollar-denominated bonds experienced larger increases in spreads relative to non-dollar bonds, especially at short maturities. Differently, in the non-dollar sample it was the spreads of longer maturity...

The global financial crisis prompted the rapid development of macro-prudential frameworks and an increased reliance on borrower-based policy tools, which influence the demand for credit. This paper studies the optimal design of one such tool, a loan-to-value (LTV) limit, and its implications for...

We study how foreign financial developments influence the conditional distribution of domestic GDP growth. Within a quantile regression setup, we propose a method to parsimoniously account for foreign vulnerabilities using bilateral-exposure weights when assessing downside macroeconomic risks....

Given a network of client-clearer relationships, we define central clearing as a function transforming bilateral trading exposures into centrally cleared exposures. By using numerical simulations, we study how this function is affected by the network's topology, focusing on the exposures of the...

Modern central banks have come to view payment systems as a key area of strategic interest, both as part of their responsibilities for financial stability and for the implementation of monetary policy. By considering the evolution of interbank settlement arrangements and central banking...