In current practice, changes in the cyclically-adjusted budget balance (CAB) are interpreted as reflecting the effort of discretionary fiscal policy. This paper shows that such an interpretation is not a sufficiently accurate description of the behaviour of fiscal policy, as, in some cases, it...

​According to EU legislation, the national authorities should use the principle of 'guided discretion' in setting the countercyclical capital buffer (CCB), which increases banks' resilience against systemic risk associated with periods of excessive credit growth. This means that the decision...

This paper explores a long dataset (1999–2005) of intraday prices on German long-term bond futures and examines market responses to major macroeconomic announcements and ECB monetary policy releases. German bond markets tend to react more strongly to the surprise component in US macro releases...

In current practice, changes in the cyclically-adjusted budget balance (CAB) are generally interpreted as reflecting the effort of discretionary fiscal policy. This paper shows that such an interpretation is not a sufficiently accurate description of the behaviour of fiscal policy, and, in some...

We propose a toolkit for the assessment of systemic risk buildup in low income countries. We show that, due to non-linearity in the relationship between credit and financial stability, the assessment should be conducted with different tools at different stages of financial development. In...

The EU's macroeconomic surveillance mechanism, namely the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure (MIP), is based on the so-called Scoreboard, which comprises a set of indicators that serve as a signalling device for potentially harmful macroeconomic developments. We first evaluate the early warning...