This paper outlines a stress testing framework for the household sector in Malta based on micro data. The analysis depends on granular data relating to income, expenses, and the value of liquid assets from the third wave of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey and assesses the financial...

Using dynamic factor models and state-space techniques we quantify financial cycles for twenty European countries over the period 1960Q1–2015Q4 capturing imbalances across credit, housing, bond and equity markets. The paper documents the existence of slow-moving and persistent financial cycles...

This paper assesses the vulnerability of Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) economies to external crises. It shows that while the average LAC economy has made significant strides to reduce vulnerability to crises to its historical minimum, there is still considerable room for improvement,...

This paper explores the empirical determinants of external crises on a world panel dataset of 62 countries over the fifty-year period 1970-2019 and estimates their risk trade-offs with the aim of informing macrofinancial prudential policies. The determinants include countries' external balance...

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...

The headline consumer price index (CPI) is often considered too noisy, narrowly defined, and/or slowly available for policymaking. On the other hand, traditional core inflation measures may reduce volatility but do not address other issues and may even exclude important information. This paper...

I study the effects of the 2019-20 coronavirus outbreak in the United States and subsequent fiscal policy response in a nonlinear DSGE model. The pandemic is a shock to the utility of contact-intensive services that propagates to other sectors via general equilibrium, triggering a deep...

Evidence on the effects of negative interest rates on bank lending is inconclusive so far. By applying a difference-in-difference estimation using granular loan level data with a large coverage from Austria, I show, contrary to some previous findings, that the introduction of a negative deposit...

When do financial markets help in predicting economic activity? With incomplete markets, the link between financial and real economy is state-dependent and financial indicators may turn out to be useful particularly in forecasting "tail" macroeconomic events. We examine this conjecture by...

We endogenize the liquidity and the quality of private assets in a tractable incomplete-market model with heterogeneous agents. The model decomposes the convenience yield of government bond into a "liquidity premium" (flight to liquidity) and a "safety premium" (flight to quality) over the...