This paper comments on the pros and cons of exit strategies. The focus is on the impact on the Euro area economy of the exit from unconventional monetary policies (UMP) by the Fed, which, appears to be the first central bank to lay out an exiting path. In this context, it discusses the issue of...

Small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) of southern euro-area economies (e.g. Italy, Spain) pay significantly higher borrowing rates than their peers of the core (e.g. Germany, France) and this divergence is widening. It is argued that severe market failures prevent SMEs in southern euro area...

Every financial crisis brings in its wake demands for more information; the latest one is no exception. Because, in deceptively tranquil times, it is well-nigh impossible to foster the consensus necessary to improve data availability, such a window of opportunity must not be missed. To be sure,...

This paper provides an overview of bank funding trends in the euro area following the 2007-09 global financial crisis and the euro area crisis. It shows that funding has become segmented along national borders and that secured instruments are much more prevalent than previously. Rising debt...

The global financial crisis has shaken the foundations of the deceptively comfortable pre-crisis central banking world. Central banks face a threefold challenge: economic, intellectual and institutional. This essay puts forward a compass to help central banks sail in the largely uncharted waters...

This paper is one of the first to investigate the determinants of bond issuance by European banks. We use a unique database of around 50,000 bonds issued by 63 banks from 14 European countries, allowing us to differentiate between different types of long-term debt securities. By investigating at...

The paper analyses and compares the domestic and cross-border effects of US and euro area unconventional monetary policy measures on 24 major advanced and emerging economies, based on an estimated global vector error-correction model (GVECM). Unconventional monetary policies are measured using...

This paper investigates the effects of macroprudential policies on bank risk through a large panel of banks operating in 61 advanced and emerging market economies. There are three main findings. First, there is evidence suggesting that macroprudential tools have a significant impact on bank...

This paper examines whether euro area unconventional monetary policies have affected the loss-absorbing buffers (that is the resilience) of the banking industry. We employ various measures to capture the effect of the broad array of programmes used by the ECB to implement balance sheet policies,...

The recent sovereign debt crisis in the euro area has seen credit spreads on sovereign bonds and credit default swaps (CDS) surge for a number of member states. While these events have increased interest in understanding the dynamics of sovereign spreads in bond and CDS markets, there is little...