Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are receiving more attention than ever before. Yet the motivations for issuance vary across countries, as do the policy approaches and technical designs. We investigate the economic and institutional drivers of CBDC development and take stock of design...

Due to buoyant capital inflows East Asian central banks with exchange rate targets accumulate foreign reserves and thereby increase surplus liquidity. East Asian central banks with more flexible exchange rate regimes also face surplus liquidity that mainly emanates from past accumulation of...

Few papers have tried to project how Chinese monetary policy will behave under flexible exchange rates. As Japan provides an important role model for China, this paper studies the role of the yen/dollar exchange rate for Japanese monetary policy after the shift of Japan from a fixed to a...

Few papers have tried to project how Chinese monetary policy will behave under flexible exchange rates. As Japan provides an important role model for China, this paper studies the role of the yen/dollar exchange rate for Japanese monetary policy after the shift of Japan from a fixed to a...

Given buoyant capital inflows and managed exchange rates the majority of emerging market central banks have continued to accumulate massive foreign reserves. If left unsterilized, the liquidity expansion can threaten domestic macroeconomic stability. To contain domestic inflation these central...

The paper analyses the impact of Japanese monetary policy crisis management on the Japanese banking sector since the 1998 Japanese financial crisis. It shows how low-cost liquidity provision as a means to stabilize banks has created a growing gap between deposits above lending and has compressed...

Since the 1980s inflationary pressures seem to materialize overproportionately outside of the sectors of consumer goods and services. We combine the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices with indices for asset prices, such as stocks and real estate, as well as the costs of public goods to develop...

Is inflation (still) a global phenomenon? We study the international co-movement of inflation based on a dynamic factor model and in a sample spanning up to 56 countries during the 1960-2023 period. Over the entire period, a first global factor explains approximately 58% of the variation in...

The paper analyses the reasons for Japan’s persistently low inflation since the bursting of the Japanese bubble economy (low inflation conundrum). It is shown that Japan experienced a structural break from a high-growth period with relatively high inflation to a low-growth period with...

The emergence of so-called “decentralised finance” (DeFi) and a shadow financial system of cryptocurrency exchanges and stablecoin issuers raises the challenge of how to apply technology-neutral regulation so that similar risks are subject to the same rules. This paper makes the case for...