The paper takes a critical look at the conceptual and empirical underpinnings of prevailing explanations for low real (inflation-adjusted) interest rates over long horizons and finds them incomplete. The role of monetary policy, and its interaction with the financial cycle in particular, deserve...

Global risk-off shocks can be highly destabilizing for financial markets and, absent an adequate policy response, may trigger severe recessions. Policy responses were more complex for developed economies with very low interest rates after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). We document, however,...

This paper revisits how coexistence of money and bonds can make a society better off. For this purpose, a model is constructed in which payment instruments matter for settling real transactions and savings instruments matter because agents differ in how they discount future utility. Because...

It is becoming increasingly accepted that lowering interest rates might at some point prove contractionary (the “reversal interest rate”) if lower lending margins cut the supply of bank loans. This paper argues that there are many other reasons to question reliance on monetary policy to...

Portuguese abstract: ABSTRATO: Com o avanço de blockchain e smart contracts, bem como constantes anúncios de projetos de grande escala utilizando estas ferramentas, parece cada vez mais provável que diversos aspectos da sociedade e economia passem a adotar estas tecnologias e, sendo...

The authors apply a Hidden Markov Model to identify regimes of shifting inflation and then employ an attribution technique based on the Mahalanobis distance to identify the economic variables that determine the trajectory of inflation. Their analysis enables policymakers to focus on the most...

This study analyses the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Indian Stock Exchange in the initial months. Inclusive investigation suggests that the fears of coronavirus effect on the global economy have rocked markets worldwide, with stock prices plunging. The Indian stocks were eventually...

This paper uses branching and interstate banking deregulation as a natural experiment to explore the effect of agency cost on the use of bank loan commitments. A simple inventory-based model shows that lower agency cost facilitates more issuance of loan commitments because lower agency cost...

The basic asset pricing equation is adapted to include the effects of unemployment, consumers' expectations, the price level and money supply on money market rates and government bond yields. Expected consumption growth is modelled using European unemployment figures and Eurostat Consumer...

In this paper we study the impact of the degree of concentration of a financial system on the aggregate demand for housing as well as the feedback effect of the size of the mortgage loan market on lenders' profits, internal capital accumulation, loan losses and potential bailouts. In a general...