Using a large database of bank financial statements, this paper investigates the determinants of the bank lending channel (BLC) of monetary transmission in Brazil between 1995 and 2012. I extend the standard empirical approach in two main ways. First, I apply a micro-founded strategy for...

The recent financial crisis has highlighted the interconnectedness between macroeconomic and financial stability and has raised the question of whether and how to combine the corresponding main policy instruments (interest rate and bank-capital requirements). This paper offers a characterization...

Using intra-day data, we assess the impact of the press release on euro area monetary data on the different segments of the euro area yield curve. For this purpose, we estimate a relation between the "news" or "surprise" in the released data for annual M3 growth and the move in the interest...

This paper offers a comprehensive comparison of the structure of banking and financial markets in the euro area. Based on this, several hypotheses about the role of banks in monetary policy transmission are developed. Many of the predictions that have been proposed for the U.S. are deemed...

The recent rise of excess liquidity in the United States and in the euro zone did not result in a resurgence of inflation. Excess liquidity, rather than heading towards the market of consumer goods, could have moved towards the asset markets. In the data covering the period going from 1980 to...

We propose a novel approach to assess whether banks' financial conditions, as reflected by bank-level information, matter for the transmission of monetary policy, while reconciling the micro and macro levels of analysis. We include factors summarizing large sets of individual bank balance sheet...

This paper presents a no-arbitrage model of the yield curve that explicitly incorporates the central-bank policy rate. After having estimated the model using daily euro-area data, I explore the behaviour of risk premia at the short end of the yield curve. These risk premia are neglected by the...

The paper characterizes the optimal tax scheme in an open economy with structural inefficiencies on the labor market and on government size. On analytical grounds first, we show that the economy can use fiscal revaluation to exploit the terms of trade externality and to dampen the impact of an...

The unprecedented tax hikes implemented in Greece in 2010 generated a much lower than expected increase in tax revenues. In this paper, we document a new stylized fact explaining this gap: the strong increase of tax evasion. We then analyze the response of the economy to tax hikes in a stylized...

This paper examines issues related to the estimation of the government spending multiplier (GSM) in a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium context. We stress a potential source of bias in the GSM arising from the combination of Edgeworth complementarity/substitutability between private...