Volatility in Italian sovereign spreads has increased since mid-2011. This paper finds that news on the euro area debt crisis and country specific events were important drivers of sovereign spreads. Movements in sovereign spreads affect CDS spreads and bond yields of Italian banks, and are...

August to September 1998 has been characterized as one of the worst episodes of global financial distress in decades. This paper investigates the transmission of the Russian and the LTCM crises through global equity markets using a panel of 14 developing and industrial countries. The results...

This paper examines the regulatory and supervisory implications stemming from the dominance of large and complex financial institutions, drawing on the recent Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP) mission work on Sweden. The analysis highlights the importance of consolidated supervision, of...

The recent global financial crisis has forced a re-examination of risk transmission in the financial sector and how it affects financial stability. Current macroprudential policy and surveillance (MPS) efforts are aimed establishing a regulatory framework that helps mitigate the risk from...

This Selected Issues paper summarizes estimates of the gap between current housing prices and their equilibrium levels in the United States. It examines short-term dynamics of price adjustment. Reflecting uncertainties about how to analyze underlying housing price trends, two approaches are used...

This 2009 Article IV Consultation focuses on euro area policies. The euro area remains in recession, with signs of improvement yet to evolve into a recovery. The large drop in financial wealth, an associated increase in private savings, tight financing conditions, and the adjustment of global...

Staff Discussion Notes showcase the latest policy-related analysis and research being developed by individual IMF staff and are published to elicit comment and to further debate. These papers are generally brief and written in nontechnical language, and so are aimed at a broad audience...

To date, an operational measure of systemic risk capturing non-linear tail comovement between system-wide and individual bank returns has not yet been developed. This paper proposes an extension of the so-called CoVaR measure that captures the asymmetric response of the banking system to...

In the wake of the recent global crisis the international community is giving an increased focus on stability of the financial system, so-called financial stability analysis. With the increasing need for data sets to undertake this analysis, the question naturally arises as to what types of data...

Real estate investment accounts for a quarter of total fixed asset investment (FAI) in China. The real estate sector’s extensive industrial and financial linkages make it a special type of economic activity, especially where the credit creation process relies primarily on collateral, like...