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...

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...

How long is the long run in the relationship between money growth and inflation? How important are high inflation episodes for the unit slope finding in the quantity theory of money? To answer these questions we study the relationship between excess money growth and inflation over time and...

This paper revisits the case for exible vs. fixed exchange rate regime in a two-country model with firm heterogeneity and nominal wage rigidity under incomplete financial markets. Dampening nominal exchange rate fluctuations simultaneously stabilizes the firm turnover in the export market. When...

In response to the Great Financial Crisis, the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England have adopted unconventional monetary policy instruments. We investigate if one of these, purchases of long-term government debt, could be a valuable addition to conventional short-term interest rate policy...

Over 2010-2016, municipal debt in Germany crowded out private investment worth 1 percent of GDP. Forced to lend to municipalities by their statutes, local public banks compensated for declining municipal-debt yields by charging higher rates to firms in Germany’s locally segmented credit...

This paper tests the hypothesis that the more fragile a banking system is, the more likely it is to experience problems when an unexpected shock hits. The empirical framework where this test is conducted is a reduced form model, where macroeconomic factors explain banks' loan losses. The...

Within a New Keynesian business cycle model, we study variables that are normally unobservable but are very important for the conduct of monetary policy, namely expected inflation and inflation risk premia. We solve the model using a third-order approximation that allows us to study time-varying...

We study the rejection of the expectations hypothesis within a New Keynesian business cycle model. According to Backus, Gregory, and Zin (1989), the Lucas general equilibrium asset pricing model can account for neither sign nor magnitude of average risk premia in forward prices, and is unable to...

It has been widely accepted that constraints on the wholesale funding of bank balance sheets amplify the transmission of monetary policy through what is called the 'bank lending channel'. We show that the effect of such bank balance sheet constraints on monetary transmission is in fact...