We study the dynamics of sovereign risk spillovers from (and between) Spain and Italy, before and after the ECB's announcement of the OMT program. We identify domestic Italian and Spanish sovereign risk shocks through an intraday event study. The shocks are used as external instruments in...

This paper analyses the reforms in the architecture of EMU since the eruption of the euro crisis in 2010. We describe major weaknesses in the original set-up of EMU, such as lack of fiscal discipline, diverging financial cycles and competitiveness positions, and a lack of crisis instruments....

Recent studies find that short-term fluctuations in EMU have been symmetric. This finding leads to benign views on the functioning of EMU as an optimum currency area (OCA), that are difficult to reconcile with the sovereign debt crisis. We try to solve this puzzle by looking at medium-term...

This paper investigates the role that Eurobonds could play in making EMU stable in the long run. We establish that EMU's budgetary problems are not only caused by lack of budgetary discipline, but also by the large and sudden fiscal deterioration during the financial crisis. This type of shock...

Against the background of the great financial crisis, this paper assesses the merits of bank-based versus market-based financing by exploring the relationship between financial structure and systemic risk. The findings indicate that bank-based financial structures are associated with higher...

This paper investigates whether ECB corporate sector purchases impact the funding structure of non-financial corporates. Regression models are estimated using a unique microdata panel, combining data on all Eurosystem corporate sector purchases and individual balance sheets of 672 non-financial...

Since the 1980s, the global banking sector has been characterized by three trends: i) a secular decline in interest rates, ii) a reallocation of bank investments from corporate loans towards mortgages and iii) the rise of shadow banking relative to regulated banking. This paper builds a general...

This paper documents a durable increase in the cross-sectoral dispersion of earnings expectations during the COVID-19 crisis. An empirical analysis shows that the rise in dispersion of earnings forecasts can be explained by the introduction of lockdown measures, which had a particularly adverse...

In this paper we study the link between central bank asset purchases and the repo market, to examine the impact of the Eurosystem’s increased footprint in financial markets resulting from the response to the Covid-19 crisis. To do so, we exploit different highly granular data on government...

Incorporating arbitrage-free term-structure dynamics into a semi-structural macro-model, we jointly estimate the real equilibrium interest rate (r), trend inflation, and term premia for the United States and the euro area, using a Bayesian approach. The natural real rate and trend inflation are...