It is commonplace to speak of central bank "independence" as if it were both a reality and a necessity. While the Federal Reserve is subject to the "dual mandate", it has substantial discretion in its interpretation of the vague call for high employment and low inflation. Most important, the...

Historically high levels of private and public debt coupled with already very low short-term interest rates appear to limit the options for stimulative monetary policy in many advanced economies today. One option that has not yet been considered is monetary financing by central banks to boost...

Monetary policy entails demand augmenting and demand diverting effects, with its impact on the trade balance-and spillovers to other countries-depending on the relative magnitude of these opposing effects. Using US data, and a sign-restricted structural VAR identification strategy, we...

We study negative interest rate policy (NIRP) exploiting ECB's NIRP introduction and administrativedata from Italy, severely hit by the Eurozone crisis. NIRP has expansionary effects on credit supply---and hence the real economy---through a portfolio rebalancing channel. NIRP affects banks...

We consider how fear of model misspecification on the part of the planner and/or the households affects welfare gains from optimal macroprudential taxes in an economy with occasionally binding collateral constraints as in Bianchi (2011). On the one hand, there exist welfare gains from...

If monetary policy is to aim also at financial stability, how would it change? To analyze this question, this paper develops a general-form framework. Financial stability objectives are shown to make monetary policy more aggressive: in reaction to negative shocks, cuts are deeper but...

This paper proposes a stochastic volatility model to measure sovereign financial distress. It examines howkey European sovereign credit default swap (CDS) spreads affect each other; specifically, the paperanalyses the volatility structure of Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal....

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 analyzes the nonlinear relationship between monetary policy and financial stress and its effects on the transmission of shocks to output. Results from a Bayesian Threshold Vector Autoregression (TVAR) model show that the effects of monetary policy shocks on output growth are stronger...

This paper investigates macroprudential policy effects on bank systemic risk and the role of inflation targeting in such effects. Using bank-level data for 45 countries comprising various monetary and exchange rate regimes, our regime-dependent dynamic panel regression results point to...