This paper uses confidential high-frequency data to investigate the dynamic effects on the government bond market of the central bank asset purchases carried out in Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. We find that in response to an outright purchase of long-term bonds: (i) long-term...

Monetary policy in the United States has often followed a gradual approach by changing policy rates through multiple small adjustments rather than all-at-once hikes or cuts. This conduct could provide a signal about the extent of the intended policy change. We quantify the state-dependent...

In this paper, we analyze whether central bank communication can be an additional tool to provide guidance on monetary policy, drive private agents’ inflation expectations and financial asset prices in the main countries of Central and Eastern Europe. By applying natural language processing...

This paper investigates possible non-linearities in the response of bank lending to monetary policy shocks in the euro area. The credit market is modeled over the period 1985-2005 by means of an Asymmetric Vector Error Correction Model (AVECM) involving four endogenous variables (loans to the...

Nominal and real interest rates in advanced economies have been decreasing since the mid-1980s and reached historical lows in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Understanding why interest rates have fallen is essential for both monetary policy and financial stability. This paper...

This paper studies the spillover effects of the ECB's monetary policies on non-euro area countries over the period 2004-2016, using a GVAR methodology, applied to a large sample of countries and an ample set of variables. Monetary policies are proxied by short-term interest rates and the Wu and...

Inflation in the euro area has been falling steadily since early 2013 and at the end of 2014 turned negative. Part of the decline has been due to oil prices, but the weakness of aggregate demand has also played a significant role. This paper uses a VAR model to quantify the contribution of oil...

This paper uses a Factor Augmented Vector Autoregressive model to assess the macroeconomic impact of the euro-area sovereign debt crisis and the effectiveness of the European Central Bank's conventional monetary policy. First, our results show that in the countries most affected by the crisis,...

Can we use newspaper articles to forecast economic activity? Our answer is yes and, to this end, we propose a brand new economic dictionary in Italian with valence shifters, and we apply it to a corpus of about two million articles from four popular newspapers. We produce a set of high-frequency...

We investigate the possible existence of asymmetries among Euro Area countries' reactions to the European Central Bank monetary policy. Our analysis is based on a Structural Dynamic Factor model estimated on a large panel of Euro Area quarterly variables. Although the introduction of the euro...