Central banks of major advanced economies have maintained a very accommodative monetary policy stance in the last few years. However, concerns have surfaced that the transmission of low policy rates to lending rates has been weaker than in the past. Has the transmission of policy rates to...

Biofuel policies are frequently mentioned in the policy and academic debates because of their potential impact on food prices. In 2005, the United States authorities passed legislation under which corn-based ethanol became in practice the only available gasoline additive. Some studies have then...

In the recent years several commentators hinted at an increase of the correlation between equity and commodity prices, and blamed investment in commodity-related products for this. First, this paper investigates such claims by looking at various measures of correlation. Next, we assess what are...

The recent global financial crisis, the Great Recession and the subsequent implementation of a variety of unconventional policy measures have raised the issue of how to correctly measure the stance of monetary policy when policy interest rates reach the zero lower bound (ZLB). In this paper, we...

The global finance crisis prompted central banks in many countries to cut short-term policy rates to near zero levels. Yet, lending rates did not fall as much as the decline in policy rates would have suggested. We argue that comparing lending rates to policy rates is misleading: banks do not...

We explore the concept of global liquidity based on a factor model estimated using a large set of financial and macroeconomic variables from 24 advanced and emerging market economies. We measure global liquidity conditions based on the common global factors in the dynamics of liquidity...