Against the background of recent house price increases in several European countries, the OeNB organized a workshop entitled "Are House Prices Endangering Financial Stability? If So, How Can We Counteract This?" It was held in Vienna on October 9 and 10, 2014. The workshop contributions...

After the destructive impact of the global financial crisis of 2008, many believe that pre-crisis financial market regulation did not take the "big picture" of the system suffciently into account and, subsequently, financial supervision mainly "missed the forest for the trees". As a result, the...

We develop an agent-based model to study the macroeconomic impact of alternative macro prudential regulations and their possible interactions with different monetary policy rules. The aim is to shed light on the most appropriate policy mix to achieve the resilience of the banking sector and...

This Occasional Paper analyses how significant expansions in central banks' mandates, roles and instruments can result in challenges to the independence of monetary policy. The paper reviews, in particular, some of the key challenges to central bank independence brought about by the global...

Italy’s policy of fiscal consolidation and growth-friendly structural reforms has substantially improved its economic prospects, but the adverse sentiment that the country has faced in the sovereign bond market over the past years has deep roots. It reflects lingering anxieties over the euro...

In this paper, we develop a financial stress index for France that can be used as a real-time composite indicator for the state of financial stability in France. We take 17 financial variables from different market segments and extract a common stress component using a dynamic approximate factor...

This paper examines the fiscal and monetary policy options available to China as a sovereign currency-issuing nation operating in a dollar standard world. We first summarize a number of issues facing China, including the possibility of slower growth, global imbalances, and a number of domestic...

The financial crisis 2008-2009 and the European sovereign debt crisis have shown that stress on financial markets is important for analyzing and forecasting economic activity. Since financial stress is not directly observable but is presumably reflected in many financial market variables, it is...

This paper arms central bank policy makers with ways to think about interactions between financial stability and monetary policy. We frame the issue of whether to integrate financial stability into monetary policy operating rules by appealing to the observation that in actual economies financial...