The effectiveness of a central bank’s monetary policymaking is determined by the merit of its policy actions and their perceived credibility. Since the 1990s central banks have placed more emphasis on clear communications and transparency as additional levers to help achieve their goals. In...

This paper studies the market microstructure of pre-industrial Europe. In particular we investigate the institution of the broker in markets and fairs, and develop a unique data set of approximately 1100 sets of brokerage rules in 42 merchant towns in Central and Western Europe from the late...

Industrialization and the rise of nationalism were the two major developments in Germany before the World War I. A novel county-level dataset reveals that industrialization and nationalism measured by membership in the "Kriegervereine'", the biggest civil organization at the time, were...

We assess the effects of financial shocks on inflation, and to what extent financial shocks can account for the "missing disinflation" during the Great Recession. We apply a vector autoregressive model to US data and identify financial shocks through sign restrictions. Our main finding is that...

We analyze the impact of financial crises and monetary policy on the supply of wholesale funding liquidity, and also on the compositional supply effects through cross-border and relationship lending. For empirical identification, we draw on the proprietary bank-to-bank European interbank dataset...

The role of bank capital as a propagation channel of shocks is strongly pronounced in recent macroeconomic models. In this paper, we show how the evolution of bank capital depends on the share of non-state-contingent assets in banks’ balance sheets and present the consequences for...

I study whether monetary gold hoarding was the main cause of the Great Depression in a structural VAR analysis. The notion that monetary forces played an important role in bringing about the depression is well established in the narrative literature, but has more recently met some skepticism by...

We estimate the "unhedged interest rate exposure" (URE) of euro area households. The URE is a welfare metric that captures the extent to which households are exposed to changes in real interest rates, and reflects the direct gains and losses in interest income flows incurred by households after...

Using federal funds futures data, we show the importance of surprise communication as a component of monetary policy for U.S. macro variables, both before and after 2008. While Gürkaynak et al. (2005) stress the importance of monetary policy communication for asset prices, much of the...