BIS Working Papers are written by members of the Monetary and Economic Department of the Bank for International Settlements, and from time to time by other economists, and are published by the Bank. The papers are on subjects of topical interest and are technical in character. The views expressed in them are those of their authors and not necessarily the views of the BIS.

The paper reviews the recent conduct of monetary policy and central banks' interest rate setting behaviour in emerging market economies. Using a standard open economy reaction function, we test whether central banks in emerging economies react to changes in inflation, output gaps and the exchange rate in a consistent and predictable manner. In most emerging economies the interest rate responds strongly to the exchange rate; in some, the response is higher than that to changes in the inflation rate or the output gap. The result is robust to alternative specification and estimation methods. This highlights the importance of the exchange rate as a source of shock and supports the "fear of floating" hypothesis. Evidence also suggests that in some countries the central bank's response to a negative inflation shock might be weaker than to a positive shock.BIS Working Papers are written by members of the Monetary and Economic Department of the Bank for International Settlements, and from time to time by other economists, and are published by the Bank. The views expressed in them are those of their authors and not necessarily the views of the BIS.

This publication is available on the BIS website (www.bis.org).

No abstract

Household debt levels relative to GDP have risen rapidly in many countries over the past decade. We investigate the relationship between household debt and growth by employing a novel estimation technique which helps to separate short-run from longrun relationships. Using data for 54 economies over 1990-2016, we show that an increase in household debt is associated with higher GDP growth in the short run, mostly within one year. By contrast, a 1 percentage point increase in the household debt-to-GDP ratio predicts lower GDP growth in the long run by 0.1 percentage point. Moreover, the negative long-run relationship between household indebtedness and GDP growth intensifies as the household debt-to-GDP ratio exceeds 70%, suggesting that policy makers are likely to face non-trivial, real costs in stimulating the economy through credit expansion. KeywordsHousehold debt • Consumption • Cross-sectional autoregressive distributed lag model • Output growth • Threshold effectWe are grateful for the Editor (Robert M Kunst) and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions. We thank participants in St Louis Fed Tipping Points Symposium on "Mapping and understanding the impact of debt on household financial well-being and economic growth"

No abstract

BIS Working Papers are written by members of the Monetary and Economic Department of the Bank for International Settlements, and from time to time by other economists, and are published by the Bank. The papers are on subjects of topical interest and are technical in character. The views expressed in them are those of their authors and not necessarily the views of the BIS.

The paper reviews the recent conduct of monetary policy and central banks' interest rate setting behaviour in emerging market economies. Using a standard open economy reaction function, we test whether central banks in emerging economies react to changes in inflation, output gaps and the exchange rate in a consistent and predictable manner. In most emerging economies the interest rate responds strongly to the exchange rate; in some, the response is higher than that to changes in the inflation rate or the output gap. The result is robust to alternative specification and estimation methods. This highlights the importance of the exchange rate as a source of shock and supports the "fear of floating" hypothesis. Evidence also suggests that in some countries the central bank's response to a negative inflation shock might be weaker than to a positive shock. BIS Working Papers are written by members of the Monetary and Economic Department of the Bank for International Settlements, and from time to time by other economists, and are published by the Bank. The views expressed in them are those of their authors and not necessarily the views of the BIS.