This recession is different. The balance sheets of consumers, companies and banks are under pressure. The private sector seeks to reduce its debt and this counteracts the Keynesian stimulus more than what the usual flow calculations would suggest. There is no doubt that the deleveraging of banks...

Consumption risk sharing among U.S. federal states increases in booms and decreases in recessions. We find that small firms' access to credit markets plays an important role in explaining this stylized fact: business cycle fluctuations in aggregate risk sharing are more pronounced in states in...

In this paper we show that the MSCI ACWI Metals and Mining Index has the ability to predict base metal prices. We use both in-sample and out-of-sample exercises to conduct such examination. The theoretical underpinning of these results relies on the present-value model for stock-price...

Literature on capital flows identifies various channels through which capital inflows could create financial fragility and economic instability in “developing and emerging economies.†Domestic credit expansion is one such channel. Capital inflows can lead to rapid expansion of domestic...

The global economy has a chronic shortage of safe assets which lies behind many recent macroeconomic imbalances. This paper provides a simple model of the Safe Asset Mechanism (SAM), its recessionary safety traps, and its policy antidotes. Safety traps share many common features with...

Interest rate term spreads and credit spreads have been well known to have a predictive power for future fluctuations of output in many developed countries. This study examines leading behaviors of interest rate term spreads and credit risk spreads in Korea in two ways. First, we apply various...

This paper shows that exchange rate alignments are also used for redistribution of income among different groups. The heterogeneous impacts of stabilisation policies lead to formation of various coalitions throughout the evolution of stabilisation programmes. These coalitions can produce...

We analyze the conditions of emergence of a twin banking and sovereign debt crisis within a monetary union in which: (i) the central bank is not allowed to provide direct financial support to stressed member states or to play the role of lender of last resort in sovereign bond markets, and (ii)...

An economy is in a liquidity trap when monetary policy cannot influence either real or nominal variables of interest. A necessary condition for this is that the short nominal interest rate is constrained by its lower bound, typically zero. The paper considers two small analytical models, one...

This paper analyzes how those global shocks as foreign business cycles and exchange rate realignments affect the Japanese economy and whether there are structural changes in the transmission mechanism of these shocks in the recent period by using a VAR model. This paper finds that, since the...