This paper summarizes the international evidence on the performance of quantitative easing (QE) as a monetary policy tool when conventional policy rates are constrained by the effective lower bound (ELB). A large body of evidence suggests that expanding the central bank's balance sheet through...

This paper examines the extent to which the evolution of monetary policy frameworks and actual policy decisions in the United States and Japan contributed to the differences in macroeconomic performance of the two countries in the 1980s and 1990s. It considers the extent to which monetary policy...

The paper engages with an important aspect of the European crisis, the European banks' reliance on collateralized (repo) market funding, that has received relatively little analytical attention in the scholarship on the European financial and sovereign debt crisis. The paper is guided by three...

This paper investigates the causes behind the euro debt crisis, particularly Germany's role in it. It is argued that the crisis is not primarily a “sovereign debt crisis” but rather a (twin) banking and balance of payments crisis. Intra-area competitiveness and current account imbalances,...

The Federal Reserve has a long history of creating aggregate demand bubbles in the United States (Niskanen 2003, 2006). In the ramp up to the Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy in September 2008, the Fed not only created a classic aggregate demand bubble, but also facilitated the spawning of many...

This paper reviews the main literature and evidence on the relevance of fiscal dominance in Italy in the last part of the 20th century and examines the evolution of the techniques of Treasury financing and of monetary targets. In the early 1970s budget deficits and monetary base creation were...

What shapes central banks' learning from the policy experiments of their peers? Both economic ideas and organizational interests play important roles. Thus, New Keynesian ideas led central banks to interpret Japan's experience with quantitative easing through the impact on risk spreads, although...

In this work, we trace and analyze the emergence of the crisis in the Bulgarian banking system as well as the behavior of the central bank and other macroeconomic institutions. The average annual rate of growth in the net profits of the commercial banks for the period 2002-2008 amounted to...

We analyze the influence of the Taylor rule on US monetary policy by estimating the policy preferences of the Fed within a DSGE framework. The policy preferences are represented by a standard loss function, extended with a term that represents the degree of reluctance to letting the interest...

We evaluate the effects on asset prices of the ECB asset purchase program (APP) announced in January 2015 and assess its main transmission channels. We do so by first extending a term structure model with bond supply effects to account for assets with different types of risk premia. We then...