The relationship between monetary policy and financial stability has gained importance in recent years as Central Bank policy rates neared the zero-lower bound. We use an SVAR model to study the impact of monetary policy shocks on three proxies for financial stability as well as a proxy for economic growth. Monetary policy is represented by policy rates for the emerging market economies and shadow rates for the advanced economies in our paper. Our main results show that monetary policy may be used to correct asset mispricing, to control fluctuations in the real business cycle and also to tame credit cycles in the majority of cases. Our results also show that for the majority of cases, in line with conventional wisdom, local currencies appreciate following a positive monetary policy shock. Monetary policy intervention may indeed be successful in contributing to or achieving financial stability. The results, however, show that monetary policy may not have the ability to maintain or re-establish financial stability in all cases. Alternative policy choices such as macroprudential policy tool frameworks which are aimed at targeting the financial system as a whole may be implemented as a means of fortifying the economy.

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This paper presents and describes a new database of major minimum wage and collective bargaining (CB) shocks covering 26 advanced economies over the period 1970–2020. The main advantage of this dataset is the precise identification of the nature and date of major shocks, which is valuable in many empirical applications. Based on the dataset, we observe that major changes in minimum wages have been more frequent than in CB in the last decades, and the majority of these were implemented during the 1980s and 1990s. In our empirical application, we find that minimum wage policy reductions have a medium-run positive impact on labor productivity and they lead to a fall in the unemployment rate. CB policy liberalizations do not seem to affect either productivity or capital formation, but they have a clear medium-term effect on the labor market. Moreover, CB policy liberalizations are characterized by a greater sensitivity to the prevailing business cycle conditions at the time of the shock (vis-à-vis minimum wage reforms).

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