Systemic risk refers to the risk of financial system breakdown due to linkages between institutions. This risk cannot be assessed by looking at how individual institutions manage risks but instead requires a full understanding of how the system as a whole operates. At present, the data available...

The past few months have exposed serious problems in relation to Europe's ability to cope with financial stress. Placing the new Financial Stability funds on a permanent basis, in the form of a new European Monetary Fund will be required if Europe is to deal effectively with the serious debt...

The euro area's TARGET2 payments system has featured heavily in academic and popular discussions of the euro crisis. Some of this commentary has described the system as being responsible for a secret bailout of Europe's periphery. Another common theme has been that the system has built up large...

This is a briefing paper the author distributed to the Irish parliamentary committee responsible for finance and public expenditure. It describes the balance sheet of Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, the organisation that was formed by combining Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide Buildings...

This paper provides an overview of Ireland's macroeconomic performance over the past decade. In addition, to presenting the underlying facts about the boom, bust and (currently limited) recovery, the paper also discusses some common fallacies and misrepresentations of economic events in Ireland....

This paper examines how banks respond to shocks to their equity. If banks react to equity shocks by more than proportionately adjusting liabilities, then this will tend to generate a positive correlation between asset growth and leverage growth. However, we show that in the presence of changes...

The slowdown in the US economy in 2008, and in the housing market in particular, has been accompanied by a sharp fall in house prices and a glut of homes for sale on the market. While the idea that this overhang of dwellings for sale should place downward pressure on house prices is intuitive,...

The introduction of the euro meant that countries with sovereign debt problems could not use monetisation and devaluation as a way to prevent default. The institutional structures of the euro were also widely thought to prevent a country in difficulties being bailed out by other euro members or...

This paper analyzes the stability over time of the econometric process for Euro-area inflation since 1970, focusing in particular on the behaviour of the so-called persistence parameter (the sum of the coefficients on the lagged dependent variables). Perhaps surprisingly, in light of the Lucas...