The EU accession countries have made remarkable progress in developing their financial sectors. Nevertheless, potential risks to banking sector stability remain. We take stock of these risks, with a focus on the challenges posed by the EU accession process. Important potential risks we identify...

The paper reviews the recent conduct of monetary policy and the central bank’s rule-based behavior in Russia. Using different policy rules, we test whether the central bank in Russia reacts to changes in inflation, output gap and the exchange rate in a consistent and predictable manner. Our...

This paper proposes a new perspective on systematic deviations from purchasing power parity. Panel evidence for OECD countries shows that international financial integration increases the national price level under managed exchange rate regimes and lowers the price level under floating exchange...

Central banks' international reserve holdings have increased significantly in the recent past. While traditional models fail to explain this accumulation of reserves, the more recent literature argues that reserves are used as a lifejacket against financial crises. However, research so far has...

Recent empirical work has shown that ongoing international financial integration facilitates cross-country consumption risk sharing. These studies typically find that countries with high equity home bias exhibit relatively low international consumption risk sharing. We extend this line of...

Using a unique dataset on daily foreign exchange intervention and a new methodological framework of a latent factor model of central bank intervention, this paper addresses the effects of intervention in an emerging market. Events in financial markets from 2002 to 2010 provide a natural...

This paper investigates the impact of the history of crises on macroeconomic performance. We first study the impact of past banking crises on the probability of a future banking crisis. We do not detect a learning process from past banking crises. Countries that have already experienced one...

We construct a new database of bilateral financial flows among euro area countries and their major world partners and explore the role of financial links in the accumulation and then adjustment of current account imbalances in the euro area. The data show that the geography of financial flows...

This paper investigates the potential impacts of the degree of divergence in open macroeconomic policies in the context of the trilemma hypothesis. Using an index that measures the relative policy divergence among the three trilemma policy choices, namely monetary independence, exchange rate...

EU accession requires, inter alia, free movements of capital. If a massive capital outflow occurs, the central banks from the accession or acceding countries may carry two types of intervention: on money market, and introducing restrictions on capital account. The paper explains when is...