How far to go – and to remain – in the direction of highly expansionary monetary policy hinges on the balance of marginal benefits and costs of additional monetary easing and its expected evolution over time. This paper sketches a framework for assessing this balance and applies it to four...

This paper reviews the state of the banking sector in Europe. At the aggregate level, the empirical data suggest that the Baltics, Cyprus, Greece and Ireland, in particular, are hit by a strong decline in lending in the wake of the financial crisis. This deleveraging is mainly caused by a...

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) manipulate the location of their debts to reduce their corporate tax burden. Indeed, by locating debts in higher-tax rate countries, MNEs can deduct interest payments against a higher tax rate. This paper provides evidence of such manipulation of debt location....

While small- and medium sized firms in Austria are generally more productive, export more, and engage more in higher technology activities than in comparable countries, they need to adapt better to the knowledge economy to maintain their relative performance levels. The capital structure of...

Financial intermediaries may increase economic efficiency through intertemporal risk smoothing. However without an adequate regulation, intermediation may fail to do this. This paper studies the effects of a production shock in a closed economy and compares abilities of market-based and...

Banking regulators often practice forbearance and ambiguity in insolvency resolutions. The paper examines the effects of regulatory forbearance and ambiguity in a context of allocational efficiency. Bailouts, liquidations and their stochastic policy mix lead to suboptimal allocations if banks do...

The recent euro area sovereign debt crisis has shown the importance of market reactions for the sustainability of debt. The objective of this paper is to calculate endogenous government debt limits given the markets assessment of the probability to default. The estimated primary balance reaction...

The high costs of crises underscore the need to strengthen the resilience of economies, notably by assessing early on potential vulnerabilities that can lead to such costly events. This paper first discusses the source and nature of potential vulnerabilities in OECD countries that can lead to...