Since the Great Recession, the main evolution in monetary policy has been its attempts to affect the medium and the long-term interest rates with instruments other than the policy rate. Consequently, measuring the stance of monetary policy by a single interest rate becomes problematic. This...

We study the effects of the ECB monetary policy and the European crises resolution policies on the 10 year sovereign bond yields of seven European countries. We find that some of the decisions have had significant impact on sovereign bond yields and have succeeded in reducing stress in the...

Typically a constant – or zero – lower bound for interest rates is applied in shadow rate term structure models. However, euro area yield curve data suggest that a time-varying lower bound might be appropriate for the euro area. I show that this indeed is the case, i.e. a shadow rate model...

Prevailing explanations of the decline in real interest rates since the early 1980s are premised on the notion that real interest rates are driven by variations in desired saving and investment. But based on data stretching back to 1870 for 19 countries, our systematic analysis casts doubt on...

In this paper I analyse the determinants of commercial banks' demand for reserves in the interbank market. I first document the pattern in the Eurosystem, where banks deviate from the required reserves balance at the start of the maintenance period only to meet the requirements closer to the...

This paper has two objectives. The first is to identify the long-term public perception of monetary policy. The second is to identify the relationship between this perception and long-term bond rates. For German data, the use of a two-factor model of the term structure results in the best...