This paper reviews the performance of the euro area since the euro's launch 20 years ago. It argues that the euro crisis has exposed existential flaws in the euro regime. Intra-area divergences and the corresponding buildup of imbalances had remained unchecked prior to the crisis. As those...

This paper assesses the contribution of the European Central Bank (ECB) to Germany's ongoing economic crisis, a vicious circle of decline in which the country has become stuck since the early 1990s. It is argued that the ECB continues the Bundesbank tradition of asymmetric policymaking: the bank...

Since the financial crisis, central banks have stressed the role of trust and communication in connection with their objectives and strategies for aligning the public's inflation expectations with their own and, consequently, improving the effectiveness of monetary policy. Assessing how much the...

This paper investigates the scarcity effects of quantitative easing (QE) policies, drawing on intra-day transaction-level data for German government bonds, purchased under the Public Sector Purchase Program (PSPP) of the ECB/Eurosystem. This paper is the first to match high-frequency QE purchase...

This paper examines the impact of monetary policy and central bank information on banks' lending using data on German bank balance sheets from 2002 to 2018. Local projection estimates show that the volume of loans to non-financial corporations declines significantly after a restrictive monetary...

Applying a BVAR model, the present paper first identifies the possible drivers of Germany's TARGET claims. In this context, in terms of potential causes, a distinction is made between a rise in the global risk assessment, tensions within the euro area, and European monetary policy. It becomes...

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...

Policy counterfactuals based on estimated structural VARs routinely suggest that bringing Alan Greenspan back in the 1970s’ United States would not have prevented the Great Inflation. We show that a standard policy counterfactual suggests that the Bundesbank–which is near-universally...

We study the role of bargaining power and outside options for the pricing of over-the-counter interbank loans using a bilateral Nash bargaining model and test the model predictions with detailed transaction-level data from the euro-area interbank market. We find that lender banks with greater...