This paper carries out an empirical investigation of the impact on bond spreads of the announcement, purchases and exit from the SNB's bond purchase program in 2009-2010. We find evidence in favor of a narrowing yield spread of covered bonds as a result of the program. The effect materialized in...

We examine the impact of the actual purchases of Treasury securities by the Federal Reserve on the Treasury yields. Using structural stability tests we find significant breaks in the relation between these variables. We find that in the zero lower bound period following the first phase of...

Starting in June 2014, the European Central Bank (ECB) stepped up its monetary accommodation in order to counter a too prolonged period of low inflation in the euro area. This article offers a narrative of the monetary policy measures taken up to December 2016 and a review of the effects of...

We study the recent Australian experience with yield curve control (YCC) of government bonds as perhaps the best evidence of how this policy might work in other developed economies. We interpret the evidence with a simple model in which YCC affects prices of both government and other bonds via...

The credit risk exposure of the German banking system is growing again after the 2009 peak and its subsequent reduction. This column comments it through the lens of the Target2 net balances in connection with the capital flows experienced by the Eurozone (EZ) balance of payments. Several aspects...

This paper examines volatility spillovers from changes in the size of the balance sheets of the Federal Reserve (FED) and European Central Bank (ECB) to emerging market economies (EMEs) from 2003 to 2014. We find that EME bond markets are most susceptible to positive volatility spillovers from...

I study the impact of quantitative easing by the FED on the prices of internationally traded and dollar denominated commodities (oil) and precious metals (gold, silver, platinum and palladium). Finite distributed lag models suggest that the long run multipliers in regressions of the log of...

We study the recent Australian experience with yield curve control (YCC) of government bonds as perhaps the best evidence of how this policy might work in other developed economies. We interpret the evidence with a simple model in which YCC affects prices of both government and other bonds via...

We introduce a specification of habit formation featuring non-separability between consumption and leisure into an otherwise standard New Keynesian model. The model can be estimated with standard Bayesian techniques and the bond pricing implications are evaluated using higher-order...