In the aftermath of the global financial and economic crisis, the ECB became deeply involved in activities aimed at stabilizing the financial system, over-leveraged banks, and over-indebted governments. This article addresses the costs of these monetary policy measures, which heavily exceed the...

The Euro area faces zero inflation paired with low economic growth, at a time when the effective lower bound on nominal interest rates and large budget deficits are constraining conventional monetary and fiscal policy. In this article, we discuss the theoretical and empirical evidence on...