The investment of the ECB reserves in US dollars and yen, delegated to a network of portfolio managers in the Eurosystem’s national central banks, involves a periodic assessment of performance against a common benchmark, controlled by the ECB and subject to revision on a monthly basis....

The investment of the ECB reserves in US dollars and yen, delegated to a network of portfolio managers in the Eurosystem’s national central banks, involves a periodic assessment of performance against a common benchmark, controlled by the ECB and subject to revision on a monthly basis....

In this paper we study the impact of shocks to global risk and global risk aversion (such as Lehman) as well as shocks with a more idiosyncratic nature (such as the euro debt crisis) on cross border portfolio flows, taking the perspective of foreign investors. We find robust evidence of...

We use cross-country microdata to analyse the risk taking of households in Europe and the US. Concerning the extensive as well as the intensive margin of risky assets, European households differ substantially from US households; but also inside Europe we document substantial differences....

In this paper we examine the optimal level of central bank activism in a standard model of monetary policy with uncertainty, learning and strategic interactions. We calibrate the model using G7 data and find that the presence of strategic interactions between the central bank and private agents...

This paper deals with the optimal allocation of risks for an agent whose preferences may be represented with prospect theory (Tversky and Kahneman, 1992). A simple setting is considered with n identically distributed and symmetric sources of risk. Under expected utility, equal diversification of...

Recently there has been much interest in studying monetary policy under model uncertainty. We develop methods to analyze different sources of uncertainty in one coherent structure useful for policy decisions. We show how to estimate the size of the uncertainty based on time series data, and...

We estimate the effect of demand and price uncertainty on firms’ investment decisions from a panel of manufacturing firms. Uncertainty measures are derived from firms’ subjective qualitative expectations. They are close to their theoretical counterparts, the variances of future demand and...

Starting from the assumption that firms are more likely to adjust their prices when doing so is more valuable, this paper analyzes monetary policy shocks in a DSGE model with firm-level heterogeneity. The model is calibrated to retail price microdata, and inflation responses are decomposed into...

This paper proposes two models in which price stickiness arises endogenously even though firms are free to change their prices at zero physical cost. Firms are subject to idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks, and they also face a risk of making errors when they set their prices. In our first...