In response to the Great Financial Crisis, the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England have adopted unconventional monetary policy instruments. We investigate if one of these, purchases of long-term government debt, could be a valuable addition to conventional short-term interest rate policy...

Do the prevailing unusually and persistently low real interest rates reflect a decline in the natural rate of interest as commonly thought? We argue that this is only part of the story. The critical role of financial factors in influencing medium-term economic fluctuations must also be taken...

Prevailing explanations of the decline in real interest rates since the early 1980s are premised on the notion that real interest rates are driven by variations in desired saving and investment. But based on data stretching back to 1870 for 19 countries, our systematic analysis casts doubt on...

Over 2010-2016, municipal debt in Germany crowded out private investment worth 1 percent of GDP. Forced to lend to municipalities by their statutes, local public banks compensated for declining municipal-debt yields by charging higher rates to firms in Germany’s locally segmented credit...

We study whether the mechanism design in the central bank liquidity auctions matters for the interbank money market interest rate levels and volatility. Furthermore, we compare different mechanisms to sell liquidity in terms of revenue, efficiency and auction stage interest rate levels and...

Building on Cecchetti and Li (2005), we show that the bank lending channel affects monetary policy trade-offs only when interest rates affect marginal costs of production (ie when there is a cost channel of monetary policy) in the New Keynesian monetary policy model. In our calibrated model the...

This study estimates the effect of the European Central Bank's second series of targeted longerterm refinancing operations (TLTRO-II) on bank lending using bank level data from multiple countries and instrumental variable estimation. Effects on corporate loans and loans for consumption are...

To study the presence of a risk-taking channel in the US, we build a comprehensive dataset from the syndicated corporate loan market and measure monetary policy using different measures, most notably Taylor (1993) and Romer and Romer (2004) residuals. We identify a negative relation between...

This study considers the pass-through of different ECB monetary policy measures to bank corporate lending rates of different maturities during 2010–2020. We find changes in the pass-through as policy rates first dip below zero in 2014 and again when negative interest rates become more...

We show how banks' excessive risk-taking, stemming from informational asymmetries in loan markets, can lead to an excessive output loss when a recession starts. Risk-based capital requirements can alleviate the output loss by reducing excessive risk-taking in ‘normal' times. Model simulations...