This paper addresses the question of whether and how easy monetary policy may lead to excesses in financial and real asset markets and ultimately result in financial dislocation. It presents evidence suggesting that periods when short-term interest rates were persistently and significantly below...

The authors solve the IS puzzle for the G7 countries. They find that five of the G7 countries have the expected significant negative relationship between the output gap and the real-rate gap; the time series of the remaining two show material deviation from expected IS-curve behavior. The...

Over-borrowing and financial stress has recently become an important issue in macroeconomic and policy discussions in the US as well as in the EU. In this paper the authors study two regimes of financial stress. In a regime of high financial stress, stress shocks can have large and persistent...

The recent financial crises pointed out the central role of public and private debt in modern economies. However, even if debt is a recurring topic in discussions about the current economic situation, economic modeling does not take into account debt as one of the crucial determinants of...

The BoltzmannGibbs distribution is currently widely used in economic modeling. One of the applications is integrated with the DSGE (Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium) model. However, a question that arises concerns whether the BoltzmannGibbs distribution can be directly applied, without...

We extract tone-adjusted, time-varying and hierarchically ordered topics from a large corpus of Dutch financial news and investigate whether these topics are useful for monitoring the business cycle and nowcasting GDP growth in the Netherlands. The financial newspaper articles span the period...

This paper studies the effect of exchange rate pass-through on inflation in Tunisia for the period 2001 to 2009. The objective is to track inflation regimes for the Tunisian economy and to forecast its determinants. Using a Markov-switching approach, the authors identified two main regimes for...

This paper puts forward a proposal to help monetary policies confront the challenge of the “normalisation” of money creation and interest rates. The difficult unwinding of years of unorthodox policies put financial stability at risk in major monetary centres and in EMEs. The authors argue...

This paper aims to assess the relationship among fiscal variables (government revenue and expenditure) in Sub-Saharan African countries. Using yearly data for the period between 1980 and 2011 in fifteen ECOWAS countries, a weak long-run relationship between government expenditure and revenue...

We use an overlapping generations model to show that a bail-out is the optimal response to a fiscal crisis when the level of integration in a Monetary Union is high and the departure from Ricardian equivalence is significant. As it may not be optimal expost, the no bail-out rule is not credible...