This paper reviews recent research on the relationship between central bank policies and inequality. A new paradigm which integrates sticky‐prices, incomplete markets, and heterogeneity among households is emerging, which allows for the joint study of how inequality shapes macroeconomic aggregates and how macroeconomic shocks and policies affect inequality. The new paradigm features multiple distributional channels of monetary policy. Most empirical studies, however, analyze each potential channel of redistribution in isolation. Our review suggests that empirical research on the effects of conventional monetary policy on income and wealth inequality yields mixed findings, although there seems to be a consensus that higher inflation, at least above some threshold, increases inequality. In contrast to common wisdom, conclusions concerning the impact of unconventional monetary policies on inequality are also not clear cut. To better understand policy effects on inequality, future research should focus on the estimation of General Equilibrium models with heterogeneous agents.

Since the 1990s, domestic bank credit has been reallocated away from lending to non-financial business and toward households. An expanding literature discusses negative effects on growth and stability of this change in credit allocation. We research its drivers. We hypothesize that if foreign capital flows into economies with few investment opportunities, it may substitute for domestic bank lending to non-financial business, so that bank balance sheets become more dominated by household lending. In GMM estimations on data for 36 economies over 1990-2011, we find evidence consistent with this mechanism. Foreign capital inflows into the nonbank sector (but not into the bank sector) are associated with lower shares of business lending in domestic bank portfolios. The association is weaker in economies with more investment opportunities, whether proxied by investment shares, current account surpluses, or EMU membership. Our results highlight the importance of sectoral destination in determining the effects of capital flows.

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and participants of the 22nd ICMAIF Conference (Rethymnon), the 49th MMF Conference (London), and research seminars at the Bank of Lithuania and De Nederlandsche Bank for helpful comments and suggestions. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the official views of De Nederlandsche Bank and the Bank of Lithuania.

In this paper we present a new data set on bank credit in four categories: home mortgages, consumer credit, bank loans to non-bank financials, and loans to nonfinancial business, for 74 economies over 1990-2013. We offer a full description of sources and methods of data collection and construction and comparisons with adjacent data sets. We document key trends including the shift in bank credit allocation away from traditional business lending. The literature suggests substantial consequences of this 'debt shift' for growth, income distribution and macroeconomic resilience, which motivated this data construction. A second contribution is to analyze drivers of debt shift in fixed-effects and system-GMM regressions for the full sample and separately for advanced and emerging economies. We find that debt shift is larger in advanced economies with a stronger presence of foreign banks and higher trade. Financial deregulation strongly correlates with debt shift.

This paper examines which economic, fiscal, external, financial, and institutional characteristics of countries affect the likelihood that they adopt inflation targeting (IT) as their monetary policy strategy. We estimate a panel binary response model for 60 countries and two subsamples consisting of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and non-OECD countries over the period 1985-2008. The findings suggest that past macroeconomic performance of a country, its fiscal discipline, exchange rate arrangements, as well as the structure and development of its financial system have a significant impact on the likelihood to adopt IT. However, the factors leading to IT adoption differ significantly between OECD and non-OECD countries. (JEL E42, E52)

This paper examines effects of the euro introduction on credit cycle coherence in the eurozone through six channels. We construct and describe credit cycles for total bank credit, household mortgages and non-financial business loans for 16 EMU economies over 1990-2015. Credit cycle coherence is measured by synchronicity of cycle movements and similarity of their amplitudes. We find that the effect of euro introduction runs through elimination of currency risk and higher capital flows, which decrease coherence of total credit and mortgage credit cycles, but increase coherence of business credit cycles. Falling interest rates contribute to the convergence of total and mortgage credit cycles. Financial deregulation and legal harmonization are associated with lower coherence of all credit cycles, while trade openness has the opposite impact. The findings impinge on monetary policy effectiveness in the eurozone, with implications for macroprudential policy.

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