Since its creation the euro area suffered from imbalances between its core and peripheral members. This paper checks whether macroprudential policy applied to the peripheral countries could contribute to providing more macroeconomic stability in this region. To this end we build a two-economy...

Euro-area accession caused boom-bust cycles in several catching-up economies. Declining interest rates and easier financing conditions fuelled spending and borrowing from abroad. Over time inflation deteriorated external competitiveness, turning the boom into a bust. We ask whether such a...

We compare two standard extensions to the New Keynesian framework that feature financial frictions. The first model, originating from Kiyotaki and Moore (1997), is based on collateral constraints. The second, developed by Carlstrom and Fuerst (1997) and Bernanke et al. (1999), accentuates the...

Occasionally binding credit constraints (OBC) have recently been explored as a promising way of modeling financial frictions. However, given their highly non-linear nature, most of the literature has concentrated on small models that can be solved using global methods. In this paper, we...

Since its creation the euro area suffered from imbalances between its core and peripheral members. This paper checks whether macroprudential policy tools - applied in a countercyclical fashion as known from the DSGE literature to the peripheral countries - could contribute to providing more...

We generalize the concept of the natural rate of interest (Laubach and Williams, 2003; Woodford, 2003) by defining and estimating the natural yield curve (NYC) -- the term structure of natural interest rates. Our motivation stems i.a. from the observation that at times when central banks attempt to...

We generalize the concept of the natural rate of interest (Laubach i Williams, 2003; Woodford, 2003) by defining and estimating the the natural yield curve (NYC) - the term structure of natural interest rates. Our motivation stems i.a. from the observation that at times when central banks attempt to...

Over the last few years significant spreads arose for both public and private debt between euro area countries. We check whether these spreads could be made to work towards the goal of providing more stability to the euro area. In particular we focus on reducing the imbalances that arose between...