E4 - Money and Interest Rates
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News-Driven International Credit Cycles
This paper examines the implications of positive news about future asset values that turn out to be incorrect at a later date in an open economy model with banking. The model captures the patterns of bank credit and current account dynamics in Spain between 2000 and 2010. The model finds that the use of unconventional policies leads to a milder bust. -
Quantifying the Economic Benefits of Payments Modernization: the Case of the Large-Value Payment System
Canada is undertaking a major initiative to modernize its payments ecosystem. The modernized ecosystem is expected to bring significant benefits to Canadian financial markets and the overall economy. We develop an empirical framework to quantify the economic benefits of modernizing the payment system in Canada. -
Revisiting the Monetary Sovereignty Rationale for CBDCs
One argument for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) is that without them, private and foreign digital monies could displace domestic currencies, threatening the central bank’s monetary policy and lender of last resort capabilities. I revisit this monetary sovereignty rationale and offer a wider view—one that considers a broader set of currency functions and captures important cross-country variation. -
Monetary Policy Spillover to Small Open Economies: Is the Transmission Different under Low Interest Rates?
Does the transmission of monetary policy change when interest rates are low or negative? We shed light on this question by analyzing the international bank lending channels of monetary policy using regulatory data on banks from four small open economies: Canada, Chile, the Czech Republic and Norway. -
Democratic Political Economy of Financial Regulation
We offer a theory of how inefficiently lax financial regulation could arise in a democratic society. -
Discount Rates, Debt Maturity, and the Fiscal Theory
Do bond risk premiums influence the effects of debt maturity operations? Using a model with realistic bond risk premiums, we show that maturity operations have sizable effects on expected inflation and output when the central bank passively responds to inflation and the fiscal authority weakly responds to the debt level. -
Are Bank Bailouts Welfare Improving?
Financial sector bailouts, while potentially beneficial during a crisis, might lead to excessive risk taking if anticipated. Taking expectations and aggregate risk implications into account, we show that bailouts can be welfare improving, but only if capital adequacy constraints are sufficiently tight. -
A Q-Theory of Banks
Using stock market data on banks, we show that the book value of loans recognizes losses with a delay. This delayed accounting is important for regulation because the requirements regulators impose are based on book values. -
Payment Habits During COVID-19: Evidence from High-Frequency Transaction Data
We examine how consumers have adjusted their payment habits during the COVID-19 pandemic. They seem to perform fewer transactions, spend more in each transaction, use less cash at the point of sale and withdraw cash from ATMs linked to their financial institution more often than from other ATMs.