South Africa appears to share some of the characteristics (property price boom, easing of monetary policy, strong domestic demand growth) of asset price booms in industrial countries that were often followed by a period of weak growth. The international experience suggests that a number of...

Central bank announcements have strong effects on interest rates, but small or even counterintuitive effects on economic expectations. Based on tick-by-tick futures prices on bonds and stock prices, I confirm these seemingly puzzling results for the euro area and provide evidence that they are...

This theoretical model analyzes the impact of interbank credit market dynamics on the resilience of the financial system. Based on a stochastic model of interbank market credit flows, lending in the interbank market is restricted by the availability of liquidity. Following a shock...

We analyse the effects of monetary policy on mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity in the United States, both on the aggregate and the firm level. We find that aggregate M&A activity decreases significantly following a monetary policy shock. The aggregate results are confirmed by an analysis...

The estimation of dynamic term structure models (DTSMs) turns out to be challenging in the presence of a small sample. It is exacerbated if the sample is characterized by a prolonged period of low interest rates near a time-varying effective lower bound. These challenges all weigh heavily when...

If firms borrow working capital to finance production, then nominal interest rates have a direct influence on inflation dynamics, which appears to be the case empirically. However, interest rates may only partly mirror the cost of working capital. In this paper we explore the role of bank...

This paper examines if US monetary policy responds to asset prices. Using real-time data we estimate a Taylor-type rule with an asset price variable. This variable refers to real estate prices, considering that those exhibit an important share in households' asset portfolio. Moreover, especially...

The personalities of central bankers moved center stage during the recent financial crisis. Some central bankers even gained "superstar" status. In this paper, we evaluate the pivotal role of superstar central bankers by assessing the difference an outstanding governor makes to economic...

We study the macroeconomic consequences of the money market tensions associated with the financial crisis of 2008-2009. Our structural model includes the banking model of Gertler and Kyiotaki (2011) in the Smets and Wouters (2003) framework. We highlight two main results. First, a financial...