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This paper provides empirical evidence that countries in emerging Europe reaped the benefits of international financial integration over the past 12 years by attracting sizeable foreign capital inflows and accelerating medium-term growth. But the aggregate pattern masks substantial heterogeneity across countries; namely, new European Union member states and the European Union candidate countries are different from the European Union neighborhood. The growth benefits are supported from both a flow and a stock perspective in terms of the link between foreign savings and growth. While foreign savings might in part substitute for national savings, the analysis finds that the channel to high growth in these countries is, primarily, through making possible the pursuit of investment opportunities that would otherwise remain unfunded; in turn, this seems to be intimately linked to the opportunities created by European Union membership. Although this conclusion does not disappear if the outlier observations of the credit boom period that preceded the financial crisis are dropped from the sample, it does suggest that these excesses did not play as positive a role for growth.

Access to Finance --- Achieving Shared Growth --- Currencies and Exchange Rates --- Economic Theory & Research --- Emerging Markets --- External vulnerability --- Finance and Financial Sector Development --- Financial frictions --- Foreign capital --- Income convergence --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth

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This paper examines the conceptual foundations of macroprudential policy by reviewing the literature on financial frictions from a policy perspective that systematically links state interventions to market failures. The method consists in gradually incorporating into the Arrow-Debreu world a variety of frictions and sources of aggregate volatility and combining them along three basic dimensions: purely idiosyncratic vs. aggregate volatility, full vs. bounded rationality, and internalized vs. uninternalized externalities. The analysis thereby obtains eight "domains," four of which include aggregate volatility, hence call for macroprudential policy variants grounded on largely orthogonal rationales. Two of them emerge even assuming that externalities are internalized: one aims at offsetting the public moral hazard implications of (efficient but time inconsistent) post-crisis policy interventions, the other at maintaining principal-agent incentives continuously aligned along the cycle. Allowing for uninternalized externalities justifies two additional types of macroprudential policy, one aimed at aligning private and social interests, the other at tempering mood swings. Choosing a proper regulatory path is complicated by the fact that the relevance of frictions is likely to be state-dependent and that different frictions motivate different (and often conflicting) policies.

Banks & Banking Reform --- Bounded rationality --- Collective action --- Debt Markets --- Economic Theory & Research --- Emerging Markets --- Externalities --- Financial crises --- Financial frictions --- Financial policy --- Labor Policies --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Macroprudential policy --- Principal-agent problems --- Pro-cyclical financial markets --- Prudential oversight --- Regulatory architecture

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This paper explores the conceptual foundations of macroprudential policy. It does so within a framework that gradually incorporates and interacts two types of frictions (principal-agent and collective action) with two forms of rationality (full and bounded), all in the context of aggregate volatility. Four largely orthogonal rationales for macroprudential policy are identified. The first (time consistency macroprudential) arises even in the absence of externalities, not to prevent financial crises but to offset the moral hazard implications of (efficient but time inconsistent) post-crisis policy interventions. The second (dynamic alignment macroprudential) protects the less sophisticated (boundedly rational) market participants by maintaining principal-agent incentives continuously aligned along the cycle and in the face of aggregate shocks. The third (collective action macroprudential) responds to the socially inefficient yet rational instability resulting from uninternalized externalities. The fourth (collective cognition macroprudential) aims at tempering non-rational mood swings where credit-constrained rational arbitrageurs fail. Finding the right policy balance is complicated by the fact that the four dimensions face policy trade-offs and their relative importance is state-dependent, hence shifts over time.

Banks & Banking Reform --- Bounded rationality --- Collective action --- Debt Markets --- Economic Theory & Research --- Emerging Markets --- Externalities --- Financial crises --- Financial frictions --- Financial policy --- Labor Policies --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Macroprudential policy --- Principal-agent problems --- Pro-cyclical financial markets --- Prudential oversight --- Regulatory architecture

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This paper analyzes the use of unconventional policy instruments in New Keynesian setups in which the ‘divine coincidence’ breaks down. The paper discusses the role of a second instrument and its coordination with conventional interest rate policy, and presents theoretical results on equilibrium determinacy, the inflation bias, the stabilization bias, and the optimal central banker’s preferences when both instruments are available. We show that the use of an unconventional instrument can help reduce the zone of equilibrium indeterminacy and the volatility of the economy. However, in some circumstances, committing not to use the second instrument may be welfare improving (a result akin to Rogoff (1985a) example of counterproductive coordination). We further show that the optimal central banker should be both aggressive against inflation, and interventionist in using the unconventional policy instrument. As long as price setting depends on expectations about the future, there are gains from establishing credibility by using any instrument that affects these expectations.

Banks and Banking --- Inflation --- Economic Theory --- Production and Operations Management --- Monetary Policy --- Central Banks and Their Policies --- Foreign Exchange --- Price Level --- Deflation --- Macroeconomics: Production --- Banks --- Depository Institutions --- Micro Finance Institutions --- Mortgages --- Neoclassical through 1925 (Austrian, Marshallian, Walrasian, Wicksellian) --- Financial Economics --- Macroeconomics --- Economic theory & philosophy --- Banking --- Output gap --- Neoclassical theory --- Financial frictions --- Prices --- Production --- Economic theory --- Banks and banking --- Neoclassical school of economics --- Economic forecasting

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We reconsider the design of welfare-optimal monetary policy when financing frictions impair the supply of bank credit, and when the objectives set for monetary policy must be simple enough to be implementable and allow for effective accountability. We show that a flexible inflation targeting approach that places weight on stabilizing inflation, a measure of resource utilization, and a financial variable produces welfare benefits that are almost indistinguishable from fully-optimal Ramsey policy. The macro-financial trade-off in our estimated model of the euro area turns out to be modest, implying that the effects of financial frictions can be ameliorated at little cost in terms of inflation. A range of different financial objectives and policy preferences lead to similar conclusions.

Business and Economics --- Inflation --- Macroeconomics --- Money and Monetary Policy --- Economic Theory --- Production and Operations Management --- General Aggregative Models: Forecasting and Simulation --- Monetary Policy --- Central Banks and Their Policies --- Banks --- Depository Institutions --- Micro Finance Institutions --- Mortgages --- Macroeconomics: Production --- Price Level --- Deflation --- Financial Economics --- Economic theory & philosophy --- Monetary economics --- Output gap --- Financial frictions --- Inflation targeting --- Production growth --- Production --- Prices --- Economic theory --- Monetary policy --- Economic forecasting --- Australia