In response to a prolonged period of low inflation, the European Central Bank (ECB) introduced Quantitative Easing (QE) in an attempt to steer inflation to its target of below, but close to, 2% in the medium term. This paper examines whether QE contributes to exuberance in euro area stock...

This paper examines portfolio rebalancing at the security level during the ECB’s Asset Purchase Programme (APP). Search for yield via portfolio rebalancing is one of the possible channels through which Quantitative Easing (QE) may affect real economic activity. This paper shows that during QE,...

The interest rate in the second series of ECB targeted longer-term refinancing operations is conditional on a participant-specific lending benchmark. The restrictiveness of this benchmark varies between banks. We employ estimations on a unique micro dataset and investigate the relationship...

In this paper we study the link between central bank asset purchases and the repo market, to examine the impact of the Eurosystem’s increased footprint in financial markets resulting from the response to the Covid-19 crisis. To do so, we exploit different highly granular data on government...