This paper investigates whether OECD countries are facing secular stagnation. Secular stagnation is defined as a situation when policy interest rates bounded at zero fail to stimulate demand sufficiently, due to low or negative neutral real interest rates and low inflation, and when ensuing...

The European Central Bank (ECB), as part of its forward-looking strategy, needs high-quality financial market statistical indicators as a means to facilitate evidence-based and sound decision-making. Such indicators include timely market intelligence and information to gauge investors'...

This Occasional Paper analyses how significant expansions in central banks' mandates, roles and instruments can result in challenges to the independence of monetary policy. The paper reviews, in particular, some of the key challenges to central bank independence brought about by the global...

What are the quantitative macroeconomic effects of the countercyclical capital buffer (CCyB)? I study this question in a nonlinear DSGE model with occasional financial crises, which is calibrated and combined with US data to estimate sequences of structural shocks. Raising capital buffers during...

Using household survey data, we document evidence of a loosening of credit standards in Euro area countries that experienced a property price boom-and-bust cycle. Borrowers in these countries exhibited significantly higher loan-to-value (LTV) and loan-to-income (LTI) ratios in the run up to the...

This paper analyses two-way interactions between monetary policy and inequality in selected advanced economies. In the context of a highly accommodative monetary stance over recent years, the analysis focuses on the effects of monetary policy on inequality over the business cycle via its impacts...

Estimates of the output gap ought to be a useful guide for macroeconomic policy, both for assessing inflationary pressures and fiscal sustainability, but their reliability has been called into question by the large revisions which they are often subject to, particularly around turning points....

The preparations for the introduction of the euro in 1999 involved the need for a new set of statistics for the euro area. Since then, significant progress has been made with regard to the coverage, timeliness and accuracy of these statistics. The reliability of the first releases - i.e. their...

The aim of this report, which has been prepared by a Task Force of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Eurosystem, is to describe and analyse the main developments in labour supply and its determinants in the euro area, review the links between labour supply and labour market institutions,...

Housing markets are large and highly volatile: they can thus create large macroeconomic risks. The current paper provides a bird’s eye view of where the housing markets of major OECD economies currently stand. It then uses the results of recently developed models to provide indications of...