Exploiting confidential data on individual German bank balance-sheets, I analyse what characterises a bank that opts to apply negative interest rates to corporate deposits. The results suggest that banks that are highly exposed to the negative interest rate policy (NIRP), i.e. funded by a larger...

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...

The financial crisis has deeply affected money markets and thus, potentially, the proper functioning of the interest rate channel of monetary policy transmission. Therefore, we analyze the effectiveness of monetary policy in steering euro area money market rates looking at, first, the...

We show that negative monetary policy rates induce systemic banks to reach-for-yield. For identification, we exploit the introduction of negative deposit rates by the European Central Bank in June 2014 and a novel securities register for the 26 largest euro area banking groups. Banks with more...

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...

We use data on speeches held by members of the European Central Bank's (ECB) Executive Board to analyze whether clarity of central bank communication has increased over time. Employing readability measures as proxy variables, we find that clarity of information provision is trending upward since...

We estimate forward-looking interest rate reaction functions in the spirit of Taylor (1993) for four major central banks augmented by implicit volatilities of stock market indices to proxy financial market stress. Our results suggest that the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve Bank and the...

Central banks wish to avoid self-fulfilling fluctuations. Monetary rules with a unit response to real rates achieve this under the weakest possible assumptions about the behaviour of households and firms. They are robust to household heterogeneity, hand-to-mouth consumers, non-rational...

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...

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...