This recession is different. The balance sheets of consumers, companies and banks are under pressure. The private sector seeks to reduce its debt and this counteracts the Keynesian stimulus more than what the usual flow calculations would suggest. There is no doubt that the deleveraging of banks...

Literature on capital flows identifies various channels through which capital inflows could create financial fragility and economic instability in “developing and emerging economies.†Domestic credit expansion is one such channel. Capital inflows can lead to rapid expansion of domestic...

The global economy has a chronic shortage of safe assets which lies behind many recent macroeconomic imbalances. This paper provides a simple model of the Safe Asset Mechanism (SAM), its recessionary safety traps, and its policy antidotes. Safety traps share many common features with...

Interest rate term spreads and credit spreads have been well known to have a predictive power for future fluctuations of output in many developed countries. This study examines leading behaviors of interest rate term spreads and credit risk spreads in Korea in two ways. First, we apply various...

This paper shows that exchange rate alignments are also used for redistribution of income among different groups. The heterogeneous impacts of stabilisation policies lead to formation of various coalitions throughout the evolution of stabilisation programmes. These coalitions can produce...

We analyze the conditions of emergence of a twin banking and sovereign debt crisis within a monetary union in which: (i) the central bank is not allowed to provide direct financial support to stressed member states or to play the role of lender of last resort in sovereign bond markets, and (ii)...

An economy is in a liquidity trap when monetary policy cannot influence either real or nominal variables of interest. A necessary condition for this is that the short nominal interest rate is constrained by its lower bound, typically zero. The paper considers two small analytical models, one...

A comparative perspective and an analytic approach grounded in mainstream economics distinguish this broad, accessible introduction to the Japanese economy. Throughout, Ito utilizes standard economic concepts in comparing Japan with the United States in terms of economic performances, underlying...

This paper examines the depth and duration of the slump that invariably follows severe financial crises, which tend to be protracted affairs. We find that asset market collapses are deep and prolonged. On a peak-to-trough basis, real housing price declines average 35 percent stretched out over...

This paper tries to assess how costly it would be for the CEECs to peg their exchange rates to the Euro. We use three types of criteria: institutional (the Maastricht criteria); some measure of real convergence; and the Optimal Currency Area criteria. The institutional criteria seem to be an...