This paper investigates the importance of labor market institutions for inflation and unemployment dynamics. Using the New Keynesian framework we argue that labor market institutions should be divided into those institutions that cause Unemployment Rigidities (UR) and those that cause Real Wage...

This paper presents stylised facts about the business cycle of the euro area. The results suggest that the stylised facts for the euro area economy and the US are very similar. The magnitude of the fluctuations in consumption, investment, prices, inflation, interest rate, monetary aggregates...

The VIX, the stock market option-based implied volatility, strongly co-moves with measures of the monetary policy stance. When decomposing the VIX into two components, a proxy for risk aversion and expected stock market volatility (“uncertainty”), we find that a lax monetary policy decreases...

This paper conducts the first empirical study of the bank balance sheet channel using data on discouraged and informally rejected firms in addition to information on the formal loan granting process. I take advantage of a unique survey data on the credit experience of firms in 8 economies that...

To identify credit availability we analyze the extensive and intensive margins of lending with loan applications and all loans granted in Spain. We find that during the period analyzed both worse economic and tighter monetary conditions reduce loan granting, especially to firms or from banks...

This paper uses a factor-augmented vector autoregressive model (FAVAR) estimated on U.S. data in order to analyze monetary transmission via private sector balance sheets, credit risk spreads and asset markets in an integrated setup and to explore the role of monetary policy in the three...

The Euro area economic activity and banking sector have shown substantial fragility over the last years with remarkable country heterogeneity. Using detailed data on lending conditions and standards, we analyse how financial fragility has affected the transmission mechanism of the single Euro...

In this paper we construct Financial Conditions Indices (FCIs) for the euro area, for the period 2003 to 2011, using a wide range of prices, quantities, spreads and survey data, grounded in the theoretical literature. One FCI includes monetary policy variables, while two versions without...

We evaluate the ECB’s monetary policy strategy against the underlying economic structure of the euro area economy, in normal times and in times of severe financial dislocations. We show that in the years preceding the financial crisis that started in 2007 the strategy was successful at...

While consumption habits have been utilised as a means of generating a hump shapedoutput response to monetary policy shocks in sticky-price New Keynesian economies,there is relatively little analysis of the impact of habits (particularly, external habits) onoptimal policy. In this paper we...