Assessing the impact of the Asset Purchase Programme (APP) by the European Central Bank (ECB) on euro area sovereign yields is challenging, because the monetary policy announcement in January 2015 was already implicitly communicated to the market in the second half of 2014. Therefore, to...

This paper studies the impact of major ECB monetary policy announcements on the portfolio allocation of euro area fund investors, using daily data between 2012 and mid-2016, a period that includes a variety of unconventional measures. We distinguish between active portfolio reallocation, driven...

In recent years there has been growing attention on the risks posed by climate change. One relevant question for financial stability is to which extent the materialisation of transition risks emerging from the sudden implementation of climate change mitigation policies would impact the...

The EU is revising its emissions trading system (ETS) and plans to impose a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) on imports. We evaluate the efficacy of the ETS retrospectively and its anti-competitive effects. We find that the ETS contributed to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the...

The effects of the unconventional monetary policy (UMP) measures undertaken by the U.S. Federal Reserve (and other major central banks) remain a crucial topic for research. This paper investigates their effects on the anchoring of long-term inflation expectations, a key dimension of UMP that has...

Central bank announcements simultaneously convey information about monetary policy and the central bank's assessment of the economic outlook. This paper disentangles these two components and studies their effect on the economy using a structural vector autoregression. It relies on the...

How do financial markets price new information? This paper analyzes price setting at the intersection of private and public information, by testing whether and how the reaction of financial markets to public signals depends on the relative importance of private information in agents' information...

We study the incidence and severity of lower-bound episodes and the efficacy of three types of state-dependent policies—forward guidance about the future path of interest rates, large-scale asset purchases and spending-based fiscal stimulus—in ameliorating the adverse consequences stemming...

Press releases announcing and explaining monetary policy decisions play a critical role in the communication strategy of central banks. Due to their market-moving potential, it is particularly important how they are drafted. Often, central banks start from the previous statement, and update the...

This study evaluates the macroeconomic effects of Outright Monetary Transaction (OMT) announcements by the European Central Bank (ECB). Using high-frequency data, we find that OMT announcements decreased the Italian and Spanish 2-year government bond yields by about 2 percentage points, while...