Banking systems have rapidly grown to a point where for many countries bank assets amount to multiples of GDP. As a consequence, government’s capacity to provide stability-enhancing fiscal guarantees against systemic crises can no longer be taken for granted. As regulation of dynamic financial...

We investigate the impact of the stance and path of monetary policy on the level of credit risk of individual bank loans and on lending standards. We employ the Credit Register of the Bank of Spain that contains detailed monthly information on virtually all loans granted by all credit...

One of the most striking macroeconomic phenomena in recent decades has been the achievement of rather low and more stable rates of inflation in many countries. Consequently, the main goal of this Paper is to offer an overview of the main policy issues arising in a low inflation environment and...

The crisis of the advanced economies in 2008-09 has focused new attention on money and credit fluctuations, financial crises, and policy responses. We study the behavior of money, credit, and macroeconomic indicators over the long run based on a new historical dataset for 14 countries over the...

This paper provides a description of the economic growth process and its major characteristics in the Netherlands from the 1930s up to the present. The first part presents some main characteristics of the long-run growth performance of the Dutch economy. It is shown that the Netherlands has...

This paper studies German bank lending during the Asian and Russian crises, using a bank level data set from the Deutsche Bundesbank. Our aim is to gain more insight into the pattern of German bank lending during financial crises in emerging markets. We find that German banks reacted to the...

How should monetary policy respond to changes in financial conditions? In this paper we consider a simple model where firms are subject to idyosincratic shocks which may force them to default on their debt. Firms' assets and liabilities are denominated in nominal terms and predetermined when...

Because of recent economic crises, financial fragility has regained prominence in both the theory and practice of macroeconomic policy. Consistent with macroeconomic paradigms prevalent at the time, the original architecture of the euro zone assumed that safeguards against inflation and...

One explanation for the poor performance of regulation in the recent financial crisis is that regulators had been captured by the financial sector. We present a micro-founded model with rational agents in which banks capture regulators by their sophistication. Banks can search for arguments of...

Do global current account imbalances still matter in a world of deep international financial markets where gross two-way financial flows often dwarf the net flows measured in the current account? Contrary to a complete markets or 'consenting adults' view of the world, large current account...