Various indicators place Cyprus’s banking system soundness ahead of emerging countries but behind advanced economies. This report discusses financial sector stability in Cyprus, using a combination of accounting-based and market-based indicators, and stress tests. Cypriot commercial banks...

The global financial crisis has highlighted the potential of financial conditions for influencing real economic activity. We examine the linkages between the financial and real sectors in the euro area, finding that (i) bank loan supply responds negatively to declines in bank soundness; (ii) a...

The financial turmoil of the late 1990s prompted a broad search for tools and techniques for detecting and preventing financial crises, and more recent episodes of instability have high lighted the importance of continuous monitoring of financial systems as a tool for preventing crises. This...

The paper investigates the role of the Intertemporal Elasticity of Substitution () in determining the equity premium. This is done in an overlapping generations economy populated by agents that live for 2 periods and maximize a Kihlstrom-Mirman expected utility function. The equity premium...

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the effects of monetary policy shocks on stock market indices in the G-7 countries and Spain using the methodology of structural VARs. A model is estimated for each country and the effects of monetary policy shocks are evaluated by means of impulse...

This paper performs seasonal integration tests based on stock price indices for the G7 countries. Nonseasonal unit roots were found in all countries. This implies that the (1-B) filter is all that is needed to obtain the stationarity of stock prices, and the inclusion of dummy variables is all...

This paper evaluates models with idiosyncratic consumption risk using Hansen and Jagannathan’s (1991) volatility bounds. It is shown that idiosyncratic risk does not change the volatility bounds at all when consumers have constant relative risk aversion (CRRA) preferences and the distribution...

This paper links banking with asset prices in a monetary macroeconomic model. The main innovation is to consider how falling asset prices affect the banking system through wide-spread borrower default, while deriving explicit solutions and balance sheet effects even far from the steady state. We...

We link banking and asset prices in a simple monetary macroeconomic model. Our main innovation is to consider how wide-spread default affects the banking system. We find that the interaction of credit, asset prices, and loan losses explains a complete spectrum of outcomes, including financial...

This paper links banking with asset prices in a monetary macroeconomic model. The main innovation is to consider how falling asset prices affect the banking system through wide-spread borrower default, while deriving explicit solutions and balance sheet effects even far from the steady state. We...