Lax monetary policy in the United States has been pointed out as one of the responsible factors behind the recent global crisis. Similar loose monetary conditions also prevailed in many European countries before the crisis and were argued to be among the accommodating factors behind the run-up...

Reform of financial regulation is a priority on the international agenda. At the call of the Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors (G-20), a number of new international standards have been issued, most notably Basel III. As a member of the G-20, the Financial Stability...

This paper argues that the pass-through in Brazil has fallen compared with estimates in other studies on earlier time periods, and remains low. Whereas pass-through effects where high and close to 1 in the high-inflation period, they seem to have fallen to around 0.2 after the Real Plan...

After analyzing the different reasons why the financial system and also the regulatory framework induced procyclicality, this paper reviews the experiences of three countries which have introduced dynamic provisioning as a regulatory tool to limit procyclicality. The case of Spain - the country...

In this paper we assess the information content of seven widely cited early indicators for the euro area with respect to forecasting area-wide industrial production. To this end, we use various tests that are designed to compare competing forecast models. In addition to the standard...