We argue that the vast bulk of movements in aggregate real economic activity during the Great Recession were due to financial frictions. We reach this conclusion by looking through the lens of an estimated New Keynesian model in which firms face moderate degrees of price rigidities, no nominal rigidities in wages, and a binding zero lower bound constraint on the nominal interest rate. Our model does ...
Countries with de jure floating exchange rate regimes are often reluctant to allow their currencies to float freely in practice. One reason why countries may wish to limit exchange rate volatility is potential negative balance sheet effects due to currency mismatches on the balance sheets of firms and households. In this paper, we show in a sample of 15 emerging market economies that countries with ...
The Russian economy is tightly woven into the global economy, and is therefore highly dependent on the development of exchange rates. Since 2014, the ruble has fallen by more than 50 percent against the US dollar. The de¬valuation goes hand in hand with the Western sanctions that were imposed due to the political tensions between Russia and Ukraine. At the same time, the decline in oil prices may also ...
Before the 2007 crisis, the trade-off between output and inflation played a leading role in the discussion of monetary policy. Instead, issues relating to financial stability played a less pronounced role in shaping the stance of monetary policy andwere limited to asset price dynamics. This Round-Up argues that the great interest that emerged after the 2007 crisis in the effects of monetary policy ...
This paper contributes to the debate of whether central banks can "lean against the wind" of emerging stock or house price bubbles. Against this background, the paper evaluates if new advances in real-time bubble detection, as brought forward by Phillips et al. (2011), can timely detect bubble emergences and collapses. Building on simulations, the paper shows that the detection capabilities of all ...
The paper analyzes the integration of euro area sovereign bond markets during the European sovereign debt crisis. It tests for contagion (i.e., an intensification in the transmission of shocks across countries), fragmentation (a reduction in spillovers) and flight-to-quality patterns, exploiting the heteroskedasticity of intraday changes in bond yields for identification. The paper finds that euro ...
The European Central Bank (ECB) decided at its Council meeting in January to implement a comprehensive program to purchase bonds, including euro area government bonds. The purchases are intended to anchor the rate of inflation and inflation expectations at below but close to two percent again. Given the lack of experience with this unconventional monetary policy instrument, the ECB is venturing into ...