This paper documents the specification of a model that was constructed to assess debt sustainability in emerging market economies. Key features of the model include external and fiscal sectors, which allow assessment of external and public debt in a unified framework' public and external debt,...

In recent years, firms in emerging market countries have increased borrowing, particularly in foreign currency, owing to easy access to global capital markets, prolonged low interest rates and good investment opportunities. This paper discusses the trends in emerging market corporate debt and...

In this paper, we use a bank-level panel dataset to investigate the determinants of bank interest margins in the Caucasus and Central Asia (CCA) over the period 1998–2013. We apply the dealership model of Ho and Saunders (1981) and its extensions to assess the extent to which high spreads of...

In housing crises, high mortgage debt can feed a vicious circle of falling housing prices and declining consumption and incomes, leading to higher mortgage defaults and deeper recessions. In such situations, resolution policies may need to be adapted to help contain negative feedback loops while...

Demographic developments have been regarded as one important cause of the long-termmovement in global interest rates. This paper provides empirical evidence of therelationship between demographics and interest rates over a wide sample of advanced andemerging market economies. It also finds that...

After 2007, countries that cut their policy interest rates close to zero turned, amongother policies, to forward guidance. We estimate a two-country model of the U.S. andCanada to quantify how unexpected changes in U.S. forward guidance affected Canada.Expansionary U.S. forward guidance shocks,...

In this paper, we investigate how negative interest rate policy (NIRP) introduced in January2016 by the Bank of Japan (BoJ) affected Japanese banks' lending and risk taking behavior.The BoJ's announcement was an unexpected surprise to the market and was followed by asharp drop in equity prices...

This paper models the relationship between short-term rates and excess reserves in an interest rate corridor as a logistic function estimated for the Eurosystem. The estimate helps to identify conditions in which short-term rates become unanchored, that is, they move away from the policy rates...

A prolonged low-interest-rate environment presents a significant challenge to banks and is likely to entail major changes to their business models over the long-run. Lower returns to maturity transformation in the face of flatter yield curves and an inability to offer deposit rates significantly...

Monetary policy space remains constrained by the lower bound in many countries, limitingthe policy options available to address future deflationary shocks. The existence of cashprevents central banks from cutting interest rates much below zero. In this paper, we considerthe practical feasibility...