The European Central Bank's asset purchase programs, while intended to stabilize the economy, may have unintended side effects on financial stability. This paper aims at gauging the effects on financial markets, the banking sector, and lending to non-financial firms. Using a structural vector...

Central bank announcements move financial markets. The response of inflation and growth expectations, on the other hand, is often small or even counterintuitive. Based on tick-by-tick futures prices on bonds and stock prices, I confirm these seemingly puzzling results for the euro area and...

In this paper, we examine the relationship between market participants' perception of central bank predictability and their assessment of central bank communication skills and success in conveying objectives as well as the importance of transparencyenhancing measures, such as voting records,...

Due to its official mandate, the European Central Bank (ECB) is assumed to maximize an implied objective function that leads it to pursue inflation with a subordinate focus on supporting the general economic policy of the European Union. This objective is - by its very nature - difficult to...

Most meetings of the Governing Council of the ECB take place intra muros at the ECB's premises in Frankfurt. Some meetings, however, are held extra muros, i.e. outside Frankfurt, hosted by one of the national central banks. This paper uses high-frequency surprises from meeting days to show that...

Monetary policy increasingly relies on steering market expectations about future policy. This paper identifies a monetary policy news shock based on a VAR model. A monetary news shock is equivalent to new information about the Fed's future monetary policy becoming available today. One example of...

We estimate the reaction function of monetary policy in the Euro area and derive the Taylor-type policy rule that a would-be ECB would have followed since the beginning of the European Monetary System (1979-2003). We first follow the standard GMM methodology developed by Clarida, Galí and...

In this paper, we analyse the effects of objective and subjective knowledge about monetary policy, as well as the information search patterns, of German citizens on trust in the ECB. We rely on a unique representative public opinion survey of German households conducted in 2011. We find that...

The ECB's one size monetary policy is unlikely to fit all euro area members at all times, which raises the question of how much monetary policy stress this causes at the national level. I measure monetary policy stress as the difference between actual ECB interest rates and Taylor-rule implied...