The model developed in this paper examines the interaction between monetary and macroprudential policies in promoting macroeconomic stability, highlighting the role of shocks and policy instruments. The paper shows that assigning the mandates of monetary and financial stability to independent authorities enhances macroeconomic stability only when some level of coordination exists between policymakers and it is the dominant institutional arrangement when monetary stability is socially important. Instead, when society values financial stability, internalising the policy spillovers by assigning the two mandates to a single policymaker could become the dominant configuration depending on the model’s parameter values.

International equity markets linkages are characterized by nonlinear dependence and asymmetries. We investigate shifts in long run comovements in stock markets by means of an ‘interrupted’ Markov switching cointegration specification. This flexible approach allow us to study to what extent documented changes in global integration are permanent, or whether market linkages are subject to changes. Using an illustrative sample from 1980 to 2012 for USA, UK and Hong Kong stock price indices, we find evidence of interrupted cointegration across these markets between May 1997 and April 2002, which is consistent with the decoupling of stock prices from fundamentals during the dot-com bubble.