Currency unions limit the ability of the central bank to use interest rate policy to accommodate asymmetric shocks. I show that collateral policy can serve to dampen asymmetric shocks in a currency area when these shocks also affect the collateral held by banks and when collateral portfolios of...

With the European debt crisis, the role of assets accepted by the Eurosystem as collateral for refinancing operations took on a new place in the public debate, as, against a backdrop of shifting demand for refinancing, movements in European bond prices led to significant fluctuations in the...

This paper shows that a central bank can more efficiently mitigate economic crises when it broadens eligibility for its discount facility to any safe asset or solvent agent. We use difference-in-differences panel regressions and emulate crises by studying how defaults of banks and...

We study fiscal spending multipliers of the UK economy using a time-varying parameter factor augmented vector autoregressive (TVP-FAVAR) model. We show that government spending multipliers vary over time and that most of the variation is cyclical: multipliers are typically above one in...

We analyze the risk-taking behavior of heterogeneous intermediaries that are protected by limited liability and choose both their amount of leverage and the risk exposure of their portfolio. Due to the opacity of the financial sector, outside providers of funds cannot distinguish 'prudent'...

We use data on granular holdings of debt and Credit Default Swaps (CDS) referencing non-financial corporations across financial investors, to investigate how CDS reallocate credit risk and whether this increases investor-level riskiness. To guide our investigation, we propose a methodology to...

We propose in this paper a simulation framework of pandemic in financial system composed of banks, asset markets and interbank markets. This framework aims at complementing the usual stress-test strategies that evaluate the impact of shocks on individual balance-sheets without taking into...

We show that an increase in banks' holdings of domestic Sovereign debt decreases the ability of domestic Sovereigns to successfully enact bailouts. When Sovereigns finance bailouts with newly issued debt and the price of Sovereign debt is sensitive to unanticipated debt issues, then bailouts...

Based on a unique data set referencing exposures on single name credit default swaps (CDS) on European reference entities, we study the structure and the topology of the European CDS market and its evolution from 2008 to 2012, resorting to network analysis. The structural features revealed show...