The negative interest rate policy (NIRP) has been in place in the euro area since June 2014. While the NIRP can provide additional monetary accommodation in the situation where the neutral rate of interest is most likely negative, there are also unintended consequences for banks’ profitability...

After August 2007 the plumbing system that supplied banks with wholesale funding, the interbank market, failed because toxic assets obstructed the pipes. Banks were forced to squeeze liquidity in a “lemons market” or to ask for liquidity “on tap” from central banks. This paper...

Do periods of persistently loose monetary policy increase financial fragility and the likelihood of a financial crisis? This is a central question for policymakers, yet the literature does not provide systematic empirical evidence about this link at the aggregate level. In this paper we fill...

We examine the transmission of monetary policy shocks to the long-duration liabilities of households and firms using high-frequency variation in 10-year swap rates around FOMC announcements. We find that four weeks after the announcement mortgage rates move one-for-one with 10-year swap rates,...

Since 2007, the European Central Bank responded decisively to the challenges posed by the global financial crisis, reducing key policy interest rates to unprecedented low levels and intervening with non-standard policy measures (i.e., monetary easing and liquidity provision). This paper aims to...

This paper describes developments in real long-term interest rates in the main OECD economies and surveys their various determinants. Real long-term government bond yields declined from the 1980s to very low levels in the recent period, though they have not reached the historical lows of the...

We show that firms' nominal required returns to capital (i.e., their discount rates) are sticky with respect to expected inflation. Such nominally sticky discount rates imply that increases in expected inflation directly lower firms' real discount rates and thereby raise real investment. We...

Existing high-frequency monetary policy shocks explain surprisingly little variation in stock prices and exchange rates around FOMC announcements. Further, both of these asset classes display heightened volatility relative to non-announcement times. We use a heteroskedasticity-based procedure to...

Central banks no longer set the short-term interest rates that they use for monetary policy purposes by manipulating the supply of banking system reserves, as in conventional economics textbooks; this process normally involves little or no variation in the supply of central bank liabilities. In...

This paper addresses the question of whether and how long-term financial trends may have modified the transmission mechanism from monetary policy decisions to economic activity. The focus is on longterm changes, abstracting from the disruptions created by the 2007-08 financial turmoil which are...