This paper studies the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve (Fed) and the Bundesbank / European Central Bank (ECB) with respect to stock or/and foreign exchange markets from 1979 to 2009. I find that Fed policy changed over time, dependent on the chairman of the Fed. During the Greenspan era...

We estimate forward-looking interest rate reaction functions in the spirit of Taylor (1993) for four major central banks augmented by implicit volatilities of stock market indices to proxy financial market stress. Our results suggest that the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve Bank and the...

The house price-to-income ratio (PIR) is widely used as an affordability indicator. This paper complements the cross-sectionally focused literature by proposing a tractable model for the PIR dynamics. Our model predicts that the PIR is very persistent and is correlated to the lagged aggregate...

We explore the dynamic effects of news about a future technology improvement which turns out ex post to be overoptimistic. We find that it is difficult to generate a boom-bust cycle (a period in which stock prices, consumption, investment and employment all rise and then crash) in response to...

Should the central bank prevent "excessive" asset price dynamics or should it wait until the boom spontaneously turns into a crash and intervene only afterwards? The debate over this issue goes back at least to the exchange between Bernanke-Gertler (BG) and Cecchetti but has not settled yet. In...