Central banks regularly communicate about financial stability issues, by publishing Financial Stability Reports (FSRs) and through speeches and interviews. The paper asks how such communications affect financial markets. Building a unique dataset, it provides an empirical assessment of the...

This study evaluates the macroeconomic effects of Outright Monetary Transaction (OMT) announcements by the European Central Bank (ECB). Using high-frequency data, we find that OMT announcements decreased the Italian and Spanish 2-year government bond yields by about 2 percentage points, while...

We test whether firms with a single bank are better shielded from loss of credit and investment cutsin periods of adverse cash flow shocks than firms with multiple bank relationships. Our estimatesof the cash flow sensitivity of investment show that both types of firms are equally subject...

In order to obtain a better understanding of the transmission channels for monetary policy, this paper assesses the importance of the interest rate and credit channels on business fixed investment in Germany. Our unbalanced panel of financial statements contains 44,345 firm/year observations for...

We present empirical evidence of the extent of wage rigidity in the euro area and European countries derived from longitudinal data on individuals. Wage rigidity is measured by the elasticity of individual real wages with respect to local unemployment. The results suggest that the elasticity is...

This paper examines two competing approaches for calculating current account benchmarks, i.e. the external sustainability approach á la Lane and Milesi-Ferretti (LM) versus the structural current accounts literature (SCA) based on panel econometric techniques. The aim is to gauge the medium...

Embedding the efficient bargaining model into the Hall (1988) approach for estimating price-cost margins shows that both imperfections in the product and labor markets generate a wedge between factor elasticities in the production function and their corresponding shares in revenue. This article...

Using individual firm data, this study analyzes the credit channel in Austria. The estimation is based on an accelerator specification of investment demand augmented by the liquidity ratio and a firm specific user cost of capital. The results show that there is a credit channel in Austria...

This paper investigates the determinants of currency invoicing in international trade. Although the currency of invoicing is central for the transmission of monetary policy, empirical research on this topic is scarce due to a lack of data. With a new extensive invoicing dataset and a panel model...