The paper analyses the role of fiscal and monetary policy for the development of the current account imbalances in the euro area, including the most recent developments during the coronavirus crisis. Several financial transmission channels such as international bank lending, changes in TARGET2...

The paper analyses the reasons for Japan’s persistently low inflation since the bursting of the Japanese bubble economy (low inflation conundrum). It is shown that Japan experienced a structural break from a high-growth period with relatively high inflation to a low-growth period with...

For the academic audience, this paper presents the outcome of a well-identified, large change in the monetary policy rule from the lens of a standard New Keynesian model and asks whether the model properly captures the effects. For policymakers, it presents a cautionary tale of the dismal...

The paper examines episodes of current account adjustment in individual economies. A central finding is that these episodes are very divergent and can be usefully classified, on the basis of cluster analysis, in three groups. A majority of cases is characterised by internal adjustment,...

IMF programs are often considered to carry a “stigma” that triggers adverse market reactions. We show that such a negative IMF effect disappears when accounting for endogenous selection into programs. To proxy for a country's access to financial markets, we use credit ratings and investor...

The controversy about sovereign debt cuts loomed prominently throughout crisis in the European Union (EU), as the EU legal rules were viewed to impose strict limitations on debt restructuring involving public creditors due to moral hazard concerns enshrined in the legal ban on bailouts. This...

For emerging economies, borrowing abroad is a double-edged sword: it can buffer against adverse economic shocks and smooth their domestic consumption; however, it can also amplify volatility in consumption, depending on the currency in which the debt is denominated and cyclicality in the...

In this paper we compare the Keynesian, neoclassical and Austrian explanations for low interest rates and sluggish growth. From a Keynesian and neoclassical perspective low interest rates are attributed to ageing societies, which save more for the future (global savings glut). Low growth is...

This paper uses loan application-level data from a peer-to-peer lending platform to study the risk-taking channel of monetary policy. By employing a direct ex-ante measure of risk-taking and estimating the simultaneous equations of loan approval and loan amount, we are the first to provide...