After the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a rapid and far-reaching shrinkage of international banks’ assets with a focus on foreign claims took place. For the largest 67 German banking groups, we find that both their characteristics and behavior in the pre-crisis episode had repercussions for the...

We study the intraday interest rate in a CCP-based GC pooling repo market and its key determinants. Since collateral used in this market is identical to collateral eligible for the daylight overdraft facility of the Eurosystem, any intraday rate in this market cannot be a result of collateral...

The financial crisis has brought to the fore concerns regarding small- and medium-sized enterprises' (SMEs) capacity to access traditional bank lending. Using European firm-level data on SME access to finance since the onset of the financial crisis, we find that bank-lending constrained SMEs are...

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the ECB has experienced an unprecedented deterioration in the level of trust. This raises the question as to what factors determine trust in central banking. We use a unique cross-country dataset which includes a rich set of socio-economic...

The aim of this paper is to assess the dimension of factors and shocks that drive financial conditions, and in particular financial stress in the euro area. A second aim is to construct summary indices on the conditions and level of stress in financial markets with the aid of a dynamic factor...

In this paper, we construct a single composite financial stress indicator (FSI) which aims to predict developments in the real economy in the euro area. Our FSI was shown to perform better than the Euro STOXX 50 volatility index for the recent banking crisis and the euro-area sovereign debt...

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...