Capital flows and real estate are pro-cyclical, and real estate has a substantial weight in economies' income and wealth. In this paper, we study the role of real estate markets in the transmission of bank flow shocks to output growth across German cities. The empirical analysis relies on a new...

Chinese real business cycle (RBC) exhibits a unique pattern, which is characterized by moderate consumption volatility, substantially low investment volatility, and acyclical trade balance. These features are quite different from business cycles in other emerging markets and cannot be explained...

Standard sticky information pricing models successfully capture the sluggish movement of aggregate prices in response to monetary policy shocks but fail at matching the magnitude and frequency of price changes at the micro level. This paper shows that in a setting where firms choose when to...

This paper investigates the transmission mechanism of mortgage premium to characterize the relationship between the housing market and the business cycle for the U.S. economy. The model matches the main features of the U.S. housing market and business cycles well. The mortgage premium is crucial...

Occasionally binding constraints (OBCs) like the zero lower bound (ZLB) can lead to multiple equilibria, and so to belief-driven recessions. To aid in finding policies that avoid this, we derive existence and uniqueness conditions for otherwise linear models with OBCs. Our main result gives...

This paper examines Deflationary dynamics in Hong Kong with a linear and a nonlinear neural-network regime-switching (NNRS) model. The NNRS model is superior to the linear model in terms of in-sample specification tests as well as out-of-sample forecasting accuracy. As befitting a small and...

This paper uses the factor-augmented VAR (FAVAR) framework to study the impact on the Hong Kong economy of the diverging monetary policies by the Fed, ECB and BoJ as well as the Mainland economy slowdown. The empirical results show that changes in US monetary policy mainly affect interest...

We analyze the contribution of credit spread, house and stock price shocks to GDP growth in the US based on a Bayesian VAR with time-varying parameters estimated over 1958-2012. Our main findings are: (i) The contribution of financial shocks to GDP growth fluctuates from about 20 percent in...

Even before their deployment in major economies, one of the concerns that has been voiced about central bank digital currency (CBDC) is that it might be too successful and lead to bank disintermediation, which could intensify further in the case of a banking crisis. Some also argue that CBDC...

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...