This paper analyses the cross-country heterogeneity in retail bank lending rates in the euro area and presents newly developed pass-through models that account for the riskiness of borrowers, the balance sheet constraints of lenders and sovereign debt tensions affecting interest rate-setting...

This paper – which takes into consideration overall experience with the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) as well as the improvements made to this measure of inflation since 2003 – finds that the HICP continues to fulfil the prerequisites for the index underlying the ECB’s...

This article estimates the monetary policy rule followed by the Brazilian Central Bank for setting its main policy instrument, the SELIC rate, for the period after the Real Plan. In order to overcome the uncertainty over the dates at which changes in parameters occurred, this paper uses...

Time-variation in disagreement about inflation expectations is a stylized fact in surveys, but little is known on how disagreement interacts with the efficacy of monetary policy. This paper fills this gap in providing theoretical predictions of monetary policy shocks for different levels of...

World trade contracted sharply in late 2008 and early 2009 following the deepening of the financial crisis in September 2008. This paper discusses the main mechanisms behind the global downturn in trade and its impact on euro area exports and competitiveness. It finds that the euro area was hit...

This paper looks at fiscal sustainability and fiscal risks from a comprehensive, global perspective. It argues that the benefits of consolidation have to be re-assessed given that industrialised countries have entered uncharted waters with unsustainable public debt dynamics and enormous...

This paper investigates to what extent Chinese monetary policy is constrained by the dollar peg. To this end, we use a cointegration framework to examine whether Chinese interest rates are driven by the Fed's policy. In a second step, we estimate a monetary model for China, in which we include...

We study the synchronization of credit booms and busts among 12 major European economies and the United States between 1972-2011. We propose a regression-based procedure to test whether boom-bust phases of credit cycles coincide across countries and to cluster countries with positively...

We assess the transmission of monetary policy shocks on oil prices using a VAR model. We identify monetary policy and financial activity shocks disentangled from demand and oil supply shocks using sign restrictions. We obtain the following main findings. (i) Monetary policy and financial...