Anniversaries are occasions for remembrance and reflections on one's history. Many central banks take the occasion of an anniversary to publish books on their history. In this essay we discuss five recent books on the history of central banking and monetary policy. In these volumes, the Great...

Gianni Toniolo was one of Italy's, and Europe's, foremost economic historians. Unfortunately, he suddenly passed away in November 2022, a few weeks after he had presented in Rome his newest book, the first volume of his history of the Bank of Italy, Storia della Banca d'Italia. Tomo I....

Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We...

Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We...

This paper analyzes the impact of global financial and economic crisis on the process of system transformation in China. First, it details the direct impact of global growth on macroeconomic development and its indirect impact on economic transformation. Second, it analyzes the direct impact of...

Foreign currency debt is widely believed to increase risks of financial crisis, especially after being implicated as a cause of the East Asian crisis in the late 1990s. In this paper, we study the effects of foreign currency debt on currency and debt crises and its indirect effects on short-term...

The Great Recession after 2008 did not turn out to be as deep and severe as the Great Depression of the 1930s. According to the European Commission, this positive result is due to the fact that economic policy-makers around the world learnt their lessons from the Great Depression in stabilizing...

The Great Depression led to a need to rethink the principles of central banking, as much as it had led to the rethinking of economics in general, with the Keynesian Revolution at the forefront of the theoretical changes. This paper suggests that the role of the monetary authority as a fiscal...

This paper employs a Markov regime-switching approach to investigate whether the Great Moderation is over since the start of the late 2000s recession. The results confirm that the recent financial crisis did cause a simultaneous high-volatility period among the G7 countries. However, the...