National borders reduce trade, but most estimates of the border effect seem puzzlingly large. We show that major methodological innovations of the last decade combine to shrink the border effect to a one-third reduction in international trade flows worldwide. The border effect varies across...

After the recent events in the global financial system there has been significant progress in the literature focusing on the sources of systemic importance of financial institutions. However, the concept of systemic importance is in practice often simplified to the problem of size and contagion...

This paper analyzes both the cross-sectional and time variation in aggregate monetary policy transmission from nominal short-term interest rates to the price level. Using Bayesian TVP-VAR models where structural monetary policy shocks are identified by a mixture of short-term and sign...

We examine whether and how selected central banks responded to episodes of financial stress over the last three decades. We employ a new monetary-policy rule estimation methodology which allows for time-varying response coefficients and corrects for endogeneity. This flexible framework applied...

We explore the ability of a macroprudential policy instrument to dampen the consequences of equity mispricing (a bubble) and the correction thereof (the bubble bursting), as well as the consequences for real activity in a production economy. In our model, producers are financed by both bank debt...

This paper contributes to a better understanding of how inflation targets are set. First, we gather evidence on how inflation targets are set from official central bank and government publications and from a questionnaire of our own design. Second, we estimate the determinants of the level of...

Excessive credit growth is often considered to be an indicator of future problems in the financial sector. This paper examines the issue of how to determine whether the observed level of private sector credit is excessive in the context of the “countercyclical capital bufferâ€, a...