The global financial crisis of 2007-09 has led to an intensive research program analyzing a wide range of issues related to financial crises. This paper presents a summary of a forthcoming book, Financial Crises: Causes, Consequences, and Policy Responses, that includes 19 contributions...

This paper reviews the literature on financial crises focusing on three specific aspects. First, what are the main factors explaining financial crises? Since many theories on the sources of financial crises highlight the importance of sharp fluctuations in asset and credit markets, the paper...

This paper arms central bank policy makers with ways to think about interactions between financial stability and monetary policy. We frame the issue of whether to integrate financial stability into monetary policy operating rules by appealing to the observation that in actual economies financial...

This paper studies the behavior of a central bank that seeks to conduct policy optimally while having imperfect credibility and harboring doubts about its model. Taking the Smets-Wouters model as the central bank’s approximating model, the paper’s main findings are as follows. First, a...

We examine policy rate recommendations of the Bank of Canada’s Governing Council (GC) and its shadow, the C.D. Howe Institute’s Monetary Policy Council (MPC). Individual recommendations of the MPC are observed but not those of the GC. Differences in the two committee’s recommendations are...

This paper generalizes and qualifies an influential monetary policy result due to Rogoff (1985) by taking fiscal policy, and fiscal-monetary interactions, into account. It shows that an appointment of a conservative central banker may, under a range of circum- stances, (i) increase the average...

The paper examines whether central banks should be committed to achieving price stability (a low-inflation target), and how strong (explicit) their long-term monetary commitment should be. For that purpose we propose a game theoretic framework that enables us to model various degrees of...

Words are critical in how the public perceives the work of central banks and the quality of monetary policy. Press releases that accompany policy rate decisions and, where available, the minutes of central bank committee meetings, are focal points for the media in public discussions about the...

Empirical literature provided convincing evidence that explicit (ie legislated) inflation targets anchor expectations. We propose a novel game theoretic framework with generalized timing that allows us to formally capture this beneficial anchoring effect. Using the framework we identify several...

The importance of the time-consistency poblem depends critically on the model one is working with and its parameterizations. This paper attempts to quantify the magnitude of stabilization bias for a small open economy using an empirically estimated micro-founded dynamic stochastic general...