Credit spreads are large, volatile and countercyclical, and recent empirical work suggests that risk premia, not expected credit losses, are responsible for these features. Building on the idea that corporate debt, while safe in ordinary recessions, is exposed to economic depressions, this paper...

The recent global financial crisis reflects numerous breakdowns in the prudential discipline of financial firms. This paper discusses ways to strengthen micro- and macroprudential supervision and restore credible market discipline. The discussion notes that microprudential supervisors are...

Credit constraints that link a private agent’s debt to market-determined prices embody a credit externality that drives a wedge between competitive and constrained socially optimal equilibria, inducing private agents to overborrow. The externality arises because agents fail to internalize the...

We argue that positive comovements between land prices and business investment are a driving force behind the broad impact of land-price dynamics on the macroeconomy. We develop an economic mechanism that captures the comovements by incorporating two key features into a DSGE model: we introduce...

I examine whether or not returns on stock markets are a leading indicator for real macroeconomic developments in Austria, Japan and the USA. Further I deal with the concept of stock market efficiency, the question whether or not information from real and financial sectors of the economy is...

Bond yield and retail interest rate spreads are presumed to lead real activity on the basis of financial accelerator mechanisms, markup cyclicality or simply because they are forward-looking. Empirical results for Austria show that retail rate spreads outperform many other indicators in this...

This paper analyses the long-run effects of financialisation and of the recent financial and economic crises for 15 countries. In order to provide a theoretical framework, we first outline three types of regimes under the conditions of financialisation, namely a debtled private demand boom, an...

This paper investigates the risk channel of monetary policy on the asset side of banks' balance sheets. We use a factoraugmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) model to show that aggregate lending standards of U.S. banks, such as their collateral requirements for firms, are significantly loosened...

Long-term interest rates in a number of small-open inflation targeting economies co-move more strongly with US long-term rates than with short-term rates in those economies. We augment a standard small open-economy model with imperfectly substitutable government bonds and time-varying term...

Financial markets are central to the transmission of uncertainty shocks. This paper documents a new aspect of the interaction between the two by showing that uncertainty shocks have radically different macroeconomic implications depending on the state financial markets are in when they occur....