We show that the credibility gain from permanently committing to a fixed exchange rate by joining the European Monetary Union can outweigh the loss from giving up independent monetary policy if the domestic monetary authority does not enjoy full credibility. Using a DSGE model, this paper shows...

On 11 March 2015, SUERF jointly organised a conference with the Oesterreichische Nationalbank and the Austrian Society for Bank Research (Bankwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft - BWG). The present SUERF Study 2015/2 includes a selection of papers based on the authors' contributions to the Vienna...

The current financial, economic and fiscal crisis is among other things characterised by complex interrelations between financial, fiscal, macroeconomic and political instability. One instability breeds another, with feedback loops generating self-reinforcing adverse cycles: The financial crisis...

In March 2013 around 130 participants from academia, banking and finance, governments and central banking gathered at the premises of the OeNB in Vienna for a conference jointly organized by the European Money and Finance Forum SUERF, the OeNB and the Austrian Society for Bank Research to...

In this paper we explore empirically to what extent expected monetary policy matters for the dynamics of bank lending rates in the U.S., the U.K. and Germany. We find that banks have increasingly behaved in a forward-looking fashion by taking expected changes in monetary policy rates into...

Despite the recent trend towards greater transparency of monetary policy, in many respects mystique still prevails in central bank speak. This paper shows that the resulting perception of ambiguity could be desirable. Under the plausible assumption of imperfect common knowledge about the degree...

This paper investigates both cross-sectional asymmetry (related to bank-speci.c characteristics like size and liquidity) and asymmetries over time (potentially related to the overall state of the economy) in Austrian bank lending reaction to monetary policy. The first type of asymmetry is...

The purpose of this paper is to model both loans to households and to non-financial corporations as well as their relation to interest rates and demand variables for Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Credit aggregates are modeled using a Markov-switching vector...

In the present paper we use a balanced bank panel data set to obtain an inference on two dimensions of the asymmetric response of bank lending to interest rate changes. The cross-sectional dimension is captured by group-specific parameters whereby each bank’s group membership is estimated...