This paper discusses the global financial crisis of 2008/9 in thirteen countries, the ten new EU members that previously were communist and the three countries of Western former Soviet Union. Their problems were excessive current account deficits and private foreign debt, currency mismatches,...

We study the apparent disconnect between what countries announce to be their exchange rate regime and what they de facto implement. Even though discrepancies between announcements and de facto polices are frequent, there is a lack of understanding of actual patterns and underlying reasons. We...

I analyze how the introduction of financial frictions can affect the trade-off between output stabilization and inflation stability and whether, in the presence of financial frictions, the optimal outcome can be realized or approached more closely if monetary policy is allowed to react to...

This paper sets up a simple model for interventions and interest rate setting assuming that the policy maker cares about deviations in inflation from a target level. Under a quadratic cost of interest rate adjustments and interventions the policy maker should use a combination of interest rate...

Distributional consequences typically receive limited attention in economic models that analyze the effects of monetary and financial sector policies. These consequences deserve more attention since financial markets are incomplete, imperfect, and economic agents' access to them is often...

International financial linkages, particularly through global bank flows, generate important questions about the consequences for economic and financial stability, including the ability of countries to conduct autonomous monetary policy. I address the monetary autonomy issue in the context of...

The paper shows that US monetary policy has been an important determinant of global equity markets. Analysing 50 equity markets worldwide, we find that returns fall on average around 3.8% in response to a 100 basis point tightening of US monetary policy, ranging from a zero response in some to a...

The bulk of recent literature on foreign exchange interventions has overlooked the potential interdependencies that may exist between these operations and the conduct of monetary policy. This is the case even under inflation targeting and especially in emerging-market economies, because central...

This paper’s field evidence is: (1) many official sectors rapidly forget the damage of the 1982-85 exchange rate liquidity crisis and reverted to what caused that crisis, namely a closed economy clean floats perspective; and (2) the 2006-2008/9 exchange rate liquidity shock would have been more...

Identifying exogenous variation in monetary policy is crucial for investigating central bank policy transmission. Using newly-collected archival real-time data utilized by the Central Bank Council of the German Bundesbank, we identify unexpected changes in German monetary policy from 580 policy...