We show that the impact of monetary policy on exchange rates has been growing significantly in recent years. Our results are established by a high-frequency event study of how key fixed income instruments - Overnight-Index Swaps (OIS) and Bonds - respond jointly with exchange rates to news about monetary policy from seven major central banks. News a ecting short-term maturity bonds tend to have...
This paper studies the interaction between monetary policy, financial markets, and the real economy. We develop a Bayesian framework to estimate proxy structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) in which monetary policy shocks are identified by exploiting the information contained in high frequency data. For the Great Moderation period, we find that monetary policy shocks are key drivers of ...
A broadly accepted view of the financial crisis contends that it was caused by an expansion in the supply of credit to high risk borrowers during the 2002-2006 credit boom. The expansion in subprime credit led to the spike in defaults and foreclosures that sparked the 2007-09 crisis. The resulting decline in housing values determined a broad contraction in credit and consumption, substantially...
This paper shows that initial cross-country institutional differences can explain to a substantial extent the relative GDP performance of European countries since 1995, after controlling for the initial level of GDP per capita and government debt. It shows that improving the quality of institutions could lead to significantly higher per capita GDP. It also shows that an initial government debt...
Member countries of the European Monetary Union (EMU) have initiated wideranging labor market reforms in the last decade. This process is ongoing, as countries that are faced with serious labor market imbalances perceive reforms as the fastest way to restore competitiveness within a currency union. This fosters fears among observers about a beggar-thy-neighbor policy that leaves non-reforming...
This study considers emerging market central bank interventions motivated by international reserve management. Emerging market central banks use currency intervention as a policy tool against exchange rate movements and accumulate international reserves as an insurance against sudden stops or reversals in capital flows. To account for both of these motivations, the model of Ito and Yabu (2007),...
We analyze the trading book of a key market maker in the European unsecured money market and study the extent to which liquidity risks accumulated by this market maker affect his pricing of liquidity and the bid/ask spread he quotes on unsecured borrowing and lending. We find that the larger the funding liquidity risk he assumed, the higher is the price he quotes for liquidity. Furthermore, his...
Using data from 16 OECD countries from 1981 to 2014 we find that the composition of fiscal adjustments is much more important than the state of the cycle in determining their e¤ects on output. Adjustments based upon spending cuts are much less costly than those based upon tax increases regardless of whether they start in a recession or not. Our results appear not to be systematically...
