The global financial crisis revealed weaknesses in the stress testing exercises performed on financial institutions and systems around the world. These failures were most evident in the area of liquidity risk, where now-obvious vulnerabilities were left largely undetected, with stress tests...

To showcase their increasing focus on financial stability, many central banks and other institutions have started publishing regular reports on financial stability. The paper presents a survey of the available financial stability reports, and proposes a framework for assessing such documents. It...

The paper presents a methodology for measuring the clarity of central bank communication, illustrating it with the case of the European Central Bank (ECB) in 1999-2007. The analysis identifies the ECB's written communication as clear about 95 percent of instances, which is comparable to, or even...

The global financial crisis has highlighted the potential of financial conditions for influencing real economic activity. We examine the linkages between the financial and real sectors in the euro area, finding that (i) bank loan supply responds negatively to declines in bank soundness; (ii) a...

We analyze the European Central Bank's (ECB's) response to the global financial crisis. Our results suggest that even during the crisis, the core part of ECB's monetary policy transmission-from policy rates to market rates-has continued to operate, but at a decreased efficiency. We also find...

Stress testing is a useful and increasingly popular, yet sometimes misunderstood, method of analyzing the resilience of financial systems to adverse events. This paper aims to help demystify stress tests, and illustrate their strengths and weaknesses. Using an Excel-based exercise with...

In this paper, we use the extreme value theory (EVT) framework to analyze contagion risk across the international banking system. We test for the likelihood that an extreme shock affecting a major, systemic U.K. bank would also affect another large local or foreign counterpart, and vice-versa....

The expansion of the global mutual funds industry has been characterized by growth in mature as well as emerging markets. This has clearly contributed to the development of local securities markets in emerging market economies, which in turn, has been key in attracting investment inflows from...

The objective of this paper is to discuss the key issues relating to the development of local corporate bond markets. We examine the requirements for local corporate bond market development, and compare and contrast experiences across both mature and emerging markets. We suggest that core...