The extremely low long-term interest rates in capital markets, to a relevant extent induced by quantitative easing, imply significant challenges for retirement saving and the stability of households' purchasing power over the long-term. The reason is that prices for the two most important...

What are the macroeconomic consequences of changing aggregate lending standards in residential mortgage markets, as measured by loan-to-value (LTV) ratios? In a structural VAR, GDP and business investment increase following an expansionary LTV shock. Residential investment, by contrast, falls, a...

This paper provides a framework for modeling the risk-taking channel of monetary policy, the mechanism how financial intermediaries' incentives for liquidity transformation are affected by the central bank's reaction to financial crisis. Anticipating central bank's reaction to liquidity stress...

Most theoretical central bank models use short horizons and focus on a single tradeoff. However, in reality central banks play complex, long horizon games and face more than one tradeoff. We account for these issues in a simple infinite horizon game with a novel tradeoff: higher rates deter...

This paper introduces agent heterogeneity, liquidity, and endogenous default to a DSGE framework. Our model allows for a comprehensive assessment of regulatory and monetary policy, as well as welfare analysis in the different sectors of the economy. Due to liquidity and endogenous default, the...

What were the economic consequences of the 2007/08 oil price hike for Germany? In this paper we use a structural vector autoregressive model to study the effects of oil price changes driven by different supply and demand shocks on the German economy. We find that a higher oil bill always stifles...

This paper analyses two well-known features of interest rates, namely their time dependence and their cyclical structure. Specifically, it focuses on the monthly Euribor rate, using monthly data from January 1994 to May 2011. Models based on fractional integration at the long run or zero...

We estimate the effects of exogenous innovations to the balance sheet of the ECB since the start of the financial crisis within a structural VAR framework. An expansionary balance sheet shock stimulates bank lending, stabilizes financial markets, and has a positive impact on economic activity...

This paper studies the challenge that increasing the inflation target poses to equilibrium determinacy in a medium-sized New Keynesian model without indexation fitted to the Great Moderation era. For moderate targets of the inflation rate, such as 2 or 4 percent, the probability of determinacy...