How do aggregate quantities at the business cycle frequency respond to shocks to the spread between residential mortgage rates and government bonds? Using a structural VAR approach, we find that mortgage spread shocks impact the real economy by both economically and statistically significant...

This paper examines the reaction of house prices in a panel of euro area countries to monetary policy surprises over the period 2010-2019. UsingJordà's (2005) local projection method, we find that house prices rise in response to expansionary monetary policy shocks that can be related to...

We construct a new indicator of de facto financial integration in the EU. The resulting indicator is pro-cyclical as it evolves along the cyclical pattern of economic activity in the European Union. It is then appended to a set of relevant financial and macroeconomic variables, within a FAVAR...

This paper analyzes the impact of US central bank communication on individual stock returns. We find a strong conditional effect of communication on stocks. The response of equities to central bank talk depends critically on the business cycle. In bad times, monetary policy communication...

The recent financial crisis and the associated decline in economic activity have raised some important questions about economic activity and its links to the financial sector. This paper introduces an index of financial stress -- an index that was used in real time by the staff of the Federal...

If the Federal Reserve does not decisively change the way it conducts monetary policy, it will probably not be capable of fighting recessions in the future as effectively as it fought them in the past. This reality helped motivate the Fed to undertake the policy framework review in which it is...

Over the last two decades the intensity of credit standards' tightening during economic contractions has exceeded their easing during expansions among euro area banks. This mechanism is fed by the boom-bust cycle of credit that, as much research has shown, is linked to financial instability with...

The prevailing narrative about the Great Recession is that it was caused by a financial crisis. This paper refutes that explanation and offers an alternative, namely that issuance of bad government debt played a key role in escalating a regular recession to an economic crisis

This paper estimates a New Keynesian DSGE model with an explicit financial intermediary sector. Having measures of financial stress, such as the spread between lending and borrowing, enables the model to capture the impact of the financial crisis in a more direct and efficient way. The model...

In this paper, I incorporate a complex network model into a state of the art stochastic general equilibrium framework with an active interbank market. On this market banks exchange funds one another giving rise to a complex network of interbanking relations. With the tools of network analysis it...