Short-term debt financing played an important role in the run-up to the financial crisis, as increases in leverage helped boost growth, but also made the economy more susceptible to a sharp downturn. Since the recession, private agents have reduced their debt level while many governments have increased borrowing. This deleveraging process appears to be holding back the recovery, and the Japanes...

During the past three years, central banks have faced challenges that few foresaw during the period known as the Great Moderation. During the crisis, central banks have responded with traditional interest rate tools, been forced to deal with the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates, and expanded the scope of their lender of last resort function. In addition, quantitative easing and credit...

i am very pleased to have the opportunity to discuss this timely and thought-provoking paper. its implications are particularly relevant, more than a year after the onset of the current financial turmoil. in particular, views remain divided on how economic activity is being affected, and how we can best ensure that lessons learned from this period help to strengthen our crisis prevention and ma...

Resolution of the debate over rules versus authority in the conduct of monetary policy appears to hinge on the solution to two separate but related problems. First, there is the problem of determining the most appropriate model to apply to describe the relationship between monetary instruments and economic aggregates. Second, there is the problem of determining the appropriate decision rules to...

This article studies optimal monetary policy when decision-makers in firms choose how much attention they devote to aggregate conditions. When the amount of attention that decision-makers in firms devote to aggregate conditions is exogenous, complete price stabilization is optimal only in response to shocks that cause efficient fluctuations under perfect information. When decision-makers in fir...

How is monetary policy transmitted through its impact on mortgage borrowings? How does this transmission mechanism depend on whether mortgages are fixed or floating rate? To address these questions, we add a model of financial institutions’ behaviour to a dynamic general equilibrium model in which some households face credit constraints. We use this model to analyse the real effects of inflatio...

Abstract While there is uncertainty about the data that enter into economic models and about the parameters that govern economic models, the fact that economists often approach macroeconomic data armed with different models of the economy suggests that uncertainty, or ambiguity, about the model could also be potentially important. A policy can be made “robust” to model uncertainty by designing ...

There is controversy about whether a monetary union is feasible in the East Asian region. Amongst the criteria for establishing a monetary union, most of the existing studies focus on the symmetric issue of fundamental shocks and the extent of correlations by applying the Blanchard and Quah (1989) structural vector autoregression (VAR) technique, which includes the firstdifferenced variables in...