Motivated by the tension first revealed during the global financial crisis between thedomestic and international financial stability obligations of central bank reserve managers,this paper offers some reflections along four main lines. First, the paper highlights howofficial reserve management...

This paper studies the effects of ECB communications about unconventional monetary policy operations on the perceived sovereign risk of Italy over the last five years. More than fifty events concerning non-standard operations are identified and classified with respect to the specific ECB...

In an estimated two-sector New-Keynesian model with durable and nondurable goods, an inverse relationship between sectoral labor mobility and the optimal weight the central bank should attach to durables inflation arises. The combination of nominal wage stickiness and limited labor mobility...

Many observers argue that the world has changed after the latest financial crisis. If that is the case, monetary policy and the process informing it will have to be reconsidered and 'learned' anew by all stakeholders. Perhaps, a new Taylor rule will emerge. A 'Taylor rule' is predicated upon two...

In the last few decades, real GDP growth and investment in advanced countries have declined in tandem. This slowdown was not the result of weak demand (there has been no shift along the Okun curve), but of a decline in potential output growth (which has shifted the Okun curve to the left). We...

This paper presents a rule for foreign exchange interventions (FXI), designed to preserve financial stability in floating exchange rate arrangements. The FXI rule addresses a market failure: the absence of hedging solution for tail exchange rate risk in the market (i.e. high volatility). Market...

The 1990s currency debacles revitalized the search for early warning and forward-looking indicators of financial vulnerabilities. This paper contributes to this task by proposing an approach to assess central bank solvency and to examine the factors putting it at risk, and by refining the...

This article surveys the literature on sovereign debt sustainability from its origins in the mid-1980s to the present, focusing on four debates. First, the shift from an “accounting based” view of debt sustainability, evaluated using government borrowing rates, to a “model based” view...

We develop a stylized balance sheet framework to help identify ‘quasi-fiscal’ components of central bank crisis interventions and show how sources of fiscal risk are created from both the new claims and how they are funded. Combining central bank balance sheet data with survey evidence from...

This paper explores how non-U.S. central banks behave when firms in their economies engage in currency mismatch, borrowing more heavily in dollars than justified by their operating exposures. We begin by documenting that, in a panel of 53 countries, central bank holdings of dollar reserves are...