The relation between the ECB's main refinancing (MRO) rates and the money market is key for the monetary transmission process in the euro area. This paper investigates how money market rates respond to the new information revealed by MRO auctions. Our results confirm a stabilizing level...

Overnight money market rates are the predominant operational target of monetary policy. As a consequence, central banks have redesigned the implementation of monetary policy to keep the deviations of the overnight rate from the key policy rate small and short-lived. This paper uses fractional...

This paper investigates why financial market experts misperceive the interest rate policy of the European Central Bank (ECB). Assuming a Taylor-rule-type reaction function of the ECB, we use qualitative survey data on expectations about the future interest rate, inflation, and output to discover...

This paper uses the European Monetary Union (EMU) as a natural experiment to investigate whether more effective monetary policy reduces the persistence of inflation. Taking into account the fractional integration of inflation, we confirm that inflation dynamics differed considerably across Euro...

Long-term inflation expectations taken from the Survey of Professional Forecasters are a major source of information for monetary policy. Unfortunately, they are published only on a quarterly basis. This paper investigates the daily information content of inflation-linked swap rates for the next...

We study the distributional consequences of housing price, bond price and equity price increases for Euro Area households using data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). The capital gains from bond price and equity price increases turn out to be concentrated among relatively...

The instability of standard money demand functions has undermined the role of monetary aggregates for monetary policy analysis in the euro area. This paper uses country-specific monetary aggregates to shed more light on the economics behind the instability of euro area money demand. Our results...

Using micro price data underlying the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices in France, Germany and Italy, we estimate relative price trends over the product life cycle and show that minimizing price and mark-up distortions in the presence of these trends requires targeting a significantly positive...

Evidence on the credibility of a central bank's inflation target typically refers to the anchoring of survey-based measures of inflation expectations. However, both the survey question and the anchoring criteria are only loosely connected to the actual inflation target used in monetary policy...

We introduce a Divisia monetary aggregate for the euro area that accounts for the heterogeneity across member countries both, in terms of interest rates and the decomposition of monetary assets. In most of the euro area countries, the difference between the growth rates of the country-specific...