Several developing economies witnessed a large number of systemic financial and currency crises since the 1980s which resulted in severe economic, social, and political problems. The devastating impact of the 1982 and 1994-95 Mexican crises, the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, the 1998 Russian...

This paper proposes a macro-prudential financial soundness analysis that can be used by most developing and transformation countries with or without crisis experience as well as by developed countries with limited data. The objective is to detect economic and financial sector vulnerability,...

Freeman (1999) proposes a model in which discount window lending and open market operations have different effects. This is important because in most of the literature, these policies are indistinguishable. However, Freeman’s argument that the central bank should absorb losses associated with...

We propose a regulatory approach for restricting debt financing as an amplification mechanism across the financial system. A small stylised model illustrates the trade-off between static and time varying limits on leverage in dampening the financial cycle. The policy section proposes its...

Market distress can be the catalyst of a deleveraging wave, as in the 2007/08 financial crisis. This paper demonstrates how market distress and deleveraging can fuel each other in the presence of adverse selection problems in asset markets. At the core of the detrimental feedback loop is agents'...

A "sunspot" is a variable that has no direct impact on the economy's fundamental condition, such as preferences, endowments or technologies, but may nonetheless affect economic outcomes through the expectations channel as a coordination device. This paper investigates how people react to...

We employ a model of leverage-induced explosive behavior in financial markets to develop a measure of financial market instability. Specifically, we derive a quantitative condition for how large levered investors can become relative to the whole market before the demand curve for securities...

We build a general equilibrium model with financial frictions that impede the effectiveness of monetary policy in stimulating output. Agents with heterogeneous productivity can increase investment by levering up, but this increases interim liquidity risk. In equilibrium, the more productive...

Chronicling the politics that led to the creation of the twelve Reserve Banks and the pursuant legal and political consequences, this paper argues that the Federal Reserve’s quasi-private Reserve Banks are, at best, opaque and unaccountable, and, at worst, unconstitutional. Following the Panic...

This paper studies how banks' balance sheets and funding costs interact in the transmission of monetary-policy rates to banks' credit supply to firms. To do so, we use creditregistry data from Germany and Portugal together with the European Central Bank's policy-rate cuts in mid-2014. The...