We study the synchronization of credit booms and busts among 12 major European economies and the United States between 1972-2011. We propose a regression-based procedure to test whether boom-bust phases of credit cycles coincide across countries and to cluster countries with positively...

We propose an arbitrage-free shadow-rate term structure model to analyze the euro-area yield curve from 1999 to mid-2015, when bond yields turned negative at various maturities. In the model the 'shadow rate' can reach any positive or negative level, while the actual one-month rate cannot fall...

We assess the macroeconomic effects of the Eurosystem's asset purchases on the four largest euro area economies using simulation exercises that combine unconventional monetary policy shocks with a fixed policy rate for the duration of the purchase programme. We identify unconventional monetary...

The European Central Bank (ECB) has adopted a mixture of conventional and unconventional tools in order to achieve its mandate of price stability in the current low-inflation, low-interest-rate scenario. This paper contributes to the existing literature by providing a taxonomy of the ECB’s...

We develop an extended real business cycle (RBC) model with financially con-strained firms and non-pledgeable intangible capital. Based on a model-consistentseries for firms’ borrowing conditions, we find, within a structural vector autoregres-sion (SVAR) framework, that, in response to an...

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...

We analyse the macroeconomic effects of exogenous contractions in bank lending to non-financial corporations in the Euro Area, Germany, France, Italy and Spain using a Bayesian vector autoregressive model with endogenous hyperparameter selection and identification via sign restrictions. We focus...

We study the cross-country dimension of financial cycles for six euro area countries using three different methodologies: principal component analysis, synchronicity and similarity measures and wavelet analysis. We find that equity prices and interest rates display synchronization across...

We explore the effects of the ECB's unconventional monetary policy on the banks' sovereign debt portfolios. In particular, using panel vector autoregressive (VAR) models we analyze whether banks increased their domestic government bond holdings in response to non-standard monetary policy shocks,...

Based on SVAR models identified by sign restrictions, we estimate the macroeconomic effects of financial and uncertainty shocks in the euro area and the US, paying particular attention to their effects on prices. While our results confirm that such disturbances are important drivers of output...