Such cooperation is an excellent opportunity to Bank of Albania employees, who may benefit from valuable skills and expertise for our Museum. It would also contribute to new networking and collaboration in research activities. In light of promoting and furthering cooperation, we are committed to turning our Conference of the Museum of the Bank of Albania into an annual event. Also, in 2017, the Museum of the Bank of Albania will organise a cycle of lectures dubbed as “Nights of the Museum”, which will address a variety of topics, such as numismatics, banking history, economic and financial education, philately, art and architecture. These projects aim at developing another aspect of our work at the Museum, which would focus on social developments vis-a-vis museum objects. Dear participants, The first conference of the Museum of the Bank of Albania coincides with the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the modern central bank of the Republic of Albania and a two-tier banking system. In these 25 years, the Bank of Albania has served to the country’s economic and financial development, supporting successfully the development of an efficient and stable financial system. It will continue to remain an institution with ambitious objectives in the field of European integration and approximation with the European Central Bank. Today, it is undertaking a new challenge: opening to the public, not only to communicate clearly its primary objectives, but also to contribute to helping the public learn about the history of money, art and tradition that it represents.

Both the macro and the asset pricing literature seem to have understood the importance of taking time-varying long-run equilibria into account, but a coherent treatment within macro finance models would be desirable. [35] And a third theme is an improved modelling of cross-country interrelations: this pertains to a more refined understanding of the workings of quantitative easing in a currency union, but also to the spillovers of policy-induced yield curve changes across different currency areas. [36],[37] Finally, one question is whether changes in long-term rates that are due to changes in the risk-less rate versus the term premium have similar effects on spending and the economy. On these and other topics concerning the interplay between monetary policy and the yield curve, I look forward to learning from new academic research – including the future contributions of the UCL research community. Thank you for your attention. [1] I am grateful to Wolfgang Lemke for his contribution to this speech. [2] On how to measure the risk-free rate in the euro area appropriately, see European Central Bank (2014), “Euro area risk-free interest rates: measurement issues, recent developments and relevance to monetary policy”, Monthly Bulletin July. [3] Some of the long time series shown in Chart 1 are from Jordà, Ò., Knoll, K., Kuvshinov, D., Schularick, M. and Taylor, A. M. (2019), “The rate of return on everything, 1870–2015”, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 134(3), pp. 1225-1298. [4] Today, I will not discuss the potential non-policy drivers of the secular downward trend in rates that I mentioned earlier.