We analyze the prices of owner-occupied housing in 97 metropolitan areas between 1980 and 2011. Our tests indicate that price changes exhibit positive serial correlation at the one year intervals, with subsequent reversals of price changes over longer intervals. Consistent with our simple model,...

This paper addresses a very European issue, the consolidation of securities trading and settlement infrastructures. In a two-country model, we analyse welfare implications of different types of consolidation. We find that horizontal integration of settlement systems is better than vertical...

Systemic risk is a key concern for central banks charged with safeguarding overall financial stability. In this paper we investigate how systemic risk is affected by the structure of the financial system. We construct banking systems that are composed of a number of banks that are connected by...

With an increasingly integrated global financial system, we frequently observe that shocks to individual asset markets affect financial markets worldwide. The aim of this paper is to quantify the comovement between bond markets in the US and emerging market economies. Following Rigobon (2003),...

This paper summarizes the literature on the performance of various extended monetary policy tools when conventional policy rates are constrained by the effective lower bound. We highlight issues that may arise when these tools are used by central banks of small open economies. Tools that have...