House-purchasing decisions and the possibility of existing homeowners to tap into their housing equity depend decisively on prevailing loan-to-value (LTV) ratios in mortgage markets with borrowing constrained households. Utilizing a smooth transition local projection (STLP) approach, I show that...

This paper uses a time-varying vector autoregressive (VAR) model for the euro area to explore the changes in the interest rate pass-through to bank retail rates following conventional and unconventional monetary policy shocks. The median estimate of the impulse responses shows a considerably...

What share of asset price movements is driven by news? We build a large, time-stamped event database covering scheduled macro news as well as unscheduled events. We find that news account for about 50% of all bond and stock price movements in the United States and euro area since 2002,...

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...

Using confidential daily data, we analyse how the intervention episode of the Bank of Israel (BOI) from 2013 to 2019 has affected the foreign value of the Israeli new shekel (ILS) and the expectations about its future value. We find that interventions amounting to US dollar (USD) 1 billion are...

This paper investigates the financial market effects of the ECB's communication on the Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP). Using data for 10 euro area countries, we first analyse the impact of different communication channels such as press releases, ECB blog contributions, speeches and...

Using confidential daily data, we analyse how the intervention episode of the Bank of Israel (BOI) from 2013 to 2019 has affected the foreign value of the Israeli new shekel (ILS) and the expectations about its future value. We find that interventions amounting to US dollar (USD) 1 billion are...

The general view underlying bank regulation is that bank disclosures providemarket discipline and reduce banks' risk-taking incentives. We show that bankdisclosures can increase bank leverage and bank risk. The reason stems from theinteraction between insured and uninsured debt. Bank disclosures...

A low interest rate environment can pose a key risk to the life insurance sector. A deteriorating return on investment holdings jeopardizes the guaranteed return on life insurance contracts. In this paper, we examine the effect of low interest rates on German life insurers by applying various...

The inability of most bank merger studies to control for hidden bailouts may lead to biased results. In this study, we employ a unique data set of approximately 1,000 mergers to analyze the determinants of bank mergers. We use data on the regulatory intervention history to distinguish between...