We introduce time-varying systemic risk (à la He and Krishnamurthy, 2014) in an otherwise standard New-Keynesian model to study whether simple leaning-against-the-wind interest rate rules can reduce systemic risk and improve welfare. We find that while financial sector leverage contains...

Policymakers often use the output gap, a noisy signal of economic activity, as a guide for setting monetary policy. Noise in the data argues for policy caution. At the same time, the zero bound on nominal interest rates constrains the central bank's ability to stimulate the economy during...

Why do countries tend to repay their domestic and external debt, even though the legal enforcement of the sovereign debt contract is limited? Contrary to conventional wisdom, we argue that temporary market exclusion after default is costly. When the domestic financial market is characterized by...

We study the specific corporate governance problems of central banks in their complex role of inflation guardians, bankers' banks, financial industry regulators/supervisors and, in some cases, competition authorities and deposit insurance agencies. We review the current institutional...

The 2008 financial crisis has shown that financial busts can influence the real economy. However, there is less evidence to suggest that the same holds for financial booms. Using a Markov-Switching vector autoregressive model and euro area data, I show that financial booms tend to be less...

We propose a shadow rate that measures the expansionary (contractionary) interest rate effects of unconventional monetary policies that are present when the lower bound is not binding. Using daily yield curve data we estimate shadow rates for the US, Sweden, the euro-area and the UK, and find...

Increasingly many central banks announce likely paths for future policy rates. Recent experience suggest that market forward rates can differ substantially from those announced. Models commonly adopted in policy analysis ignore such differences. This paper studies a simple model that can capture...

Models in the infinite horizon macro-housing literature often assume that borrowers are constrained exclusively by the loan-to-value (LTV) ratio. Motivated by the Swedish micro-data, I explore an alternative arrangement where borrowers are constrained by the feasibility of repayment, but choose...

In this paper, I use high-frequency financial market estimates to identify the monetary policy shock in a non-recursive 133 variable FAVAR. All restrictions are imposed exclusively on impact, and only on financial market variables. Using the economy's underlying factor structure as the link...

We develop a novel high-dimensional non-Gaussian modeling framework to infer measures of conditional and joint default risk for many financial sector firms. The model is based on a dynamic Generalized Hyperbolic Skewed-t block-equicorrelation copula with time-varying volatility and dependence...