A range of hypotheses have been put forward to explain the boom in house prices that occurred in the United States from the mid-1990s to 2007. This paper considers the relative importance of two of these hypotheses. First, global imbalances increased liquidity in the US financial system, driving...

This paper brings together modern empirical techniques, a sign-restricted structural vector autoregression, with contemporary high frequency data to answer an old question – what role did macroeconomic policy play in Britain’s high unemployment and deflation in the years 1919 to 1938. Its...

Why is inflation so much lower and at the same time more stable in developed economies in the 1990s, compared with the 1970s? This paper suggests that the United Kingdom, United States and other countries may have escaped from a volatile inflation equilibrium. Our argument builds on the story...

This paper investigates the role of external balance sheet variables as determinants of currency crises in emerging market (EME) and advanced economies. A random effect probit model is used in a panel of 40 countries with monthly data over the January 1980-December 2004 period. The main results...

We investigate the effects of Central Bank interventions which are designed to smooth exchange rate volatility but are not aimed at a particular trend level. We present a model in which the intervention flow is a non-linear mapping of the market order flow. Simulations show that small daily...

We explore the role of ‘dollar shortage' shocks and central bank swap lines in a two-country New Keynesian model with financial frictions. Domestic banks issue both domestic and foreign currency debt and lend in domestic currency. Foreign currency-specific funding shocks, which are amplified...

Swap lines between advanced-economy central banks are a new important part of the global financial architecture. This paper analyses their monetary policy effects from three perspectives. First, from the perspective of the central banks, it shows that the swap line mimics discount-window credit...

Using vector autoregressive models with either constant or time-varying parameters and stochastic volatility for the United States, we find that a contractionary monetary policy shock has a persistent negative impact on the asset growth of commercial banks, but increases the asset growth of...

This paper uses a ‘trendy' approach to understand UK inflation dynamics. It focuses on the time series to isolate a low-frequency and slow-moving component of inflation (the trend) from deviations around this trend. We find that this slow-moving trend explains a substantial share of UK...

In this paper we consider the optimal control problem of models with Markov regime shifts and forward-looking agents. These models are very general and flexible tools for modelling model uncertainty. An algorithm is devised to compute the solution of a linear rational expectations model with...