This volume contains a collection of papers, commentaries and speeches that review the strategic and operational decisions taken by the central banks to combat the crisis and that reflect on the lessons for the future. The contributions are grouped around five broad topics: monetary policy...

This paper describes the response of three central banks to the 2007-09 financial crisis: the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England. In particular, the paper discusses the design, implementation and impact of so-called "non-standard" monetary policy measures focusing...

We define nowcasting as the prediction of the present, the very near future and the very recent past. Crucial in this process is to use timely monthly information in order to nowcast key economic variables, such as e.g. GDP, that are typically collected at low frequency and published with long...

We analyse the impact on the euro area economy of the ECB’s non-standard monetary policy measures by studying the effect of the expansion of intermediation of interbank transactions across the central bank balance sheet. We exploit data drawn from the aggregated Monetary and Financial...

The term now-casting is a contraction for now and forecasting and has been used for a long-time in meteorology and recently also in economics. In this paper we survey recent developments in economic now-casting with special focus on those models that formalize key features of how market...

Standard accounts of the Great Depression attribute an important causal role to monetary policy errors in accounting for the catastrophic collapse in economic activity observed in the early 1930s. While views vary on the relative importance of money versus credit contraction in the propagation...

Not so much and we should not, at least not yet. JEL Classification: E32, C33, C53, F2, F43

This paper shows how large-dimensional dynamic factor models are suitable for structural analysis. We establish sufficient conditions for identification of the structural shocks and the associated impulse response functions. In particular, we argue that, if the data follow an approximate factor...

This paper shows that Vector Autoregression with Bayesian shrinkage is an appropriate tool for large dynamic models. We build on the results by De Mol, Giannone, and Reichlin (2008) and show that, when the degree of shrinkage is set in relation to the cross-sectional dimension, the forecasting...

Global financial integration unlocks a huge potential for international risk sharing. We examine the degree to which international equity holdings act as a risk sharing device in industrial and emerging economies. We split equity returns into investment income (dividend distribution) and capital...