This paper explores the financial stability implications of mark-to-market accounting, in particular its tendency to amplify financial cycles and the "reach for yield". Market prices play a dual role. Not only do they serve as a signal of the underlying fundamentals and the actions taken by...

When do flexible exchange rates prevent monetary and financial conditions from spilling over across currencies? We examine a model in which international investors strategically supply capital to a small inflation-targeting economy with flexible exchange rates. For some combination of...

When does the combination of flexible exchange rates and domestic inflation-oriented monetary policy guarantee insulation from global financial conditions? We examine a dynamic global game model of international portfolio flows where, for some combination of parameters, the unique equilibrium...

Financial institutions have been at the forefront of the debate on the controversial shift in international standards from historical cost accounting to mark-to-market accounting. We show that the trade-offs at stake in this debate are far from one-sided. While the historical cost regime leads...

Accounting is sometimes seen just as a veil leaving the economic fundamentals unaffected. Indeed, in the context of completely frictionless markets, where assets trade in fully liquid markets and there are no problems of perverse incentives, accounting would be irrelevant since reliable market...

This paper compares three types of early warning indicators of financial instability – those based on financial market prices, those based on normalized measures of total credit and those based on liabilities of financial intermediaries. Prices perform well as concurrent indicators of market...