Negative monetary policy rates are associated with a particular friction because the remuneration of retail deposits tends to be floored at zero. We investigate whether this friction affects banks' reactions when the policy rate is lowered to negative levels, compared to a standard rate cut in...

Negative interest rate policy (NIRP) is associated with a particular friction. The remuneration of banks´ retail deposits tends to be floored at zero, which limits the transmission of policy rate cuts to bank funding costs. We investigate whether this friction affects banks’ reactions under...

Based on ordered Probit models and twenty years of euro area data, we estimate empirical reaction functions for the ECB´s monetary policy and augment them with communication indicators. First, we find that the ECB responded to risks to price stability in line with its primary objective, and...

Could a monetary policy loosening entail the opposite effect than the intended expansionary impact in a low interest rate environment? We demonstrate that the risk of hitting the rate at which the effect reverses depends on the capitalization of the banking sector by using a non-linear...

Assigning a discretionary central bank a mandate to stabilize an average inflation rate—rather than a period-by-period inflation rate—increases welfare in a New Keynesian model with an occasionally binding lower bound on nominal interest rates. Under rational expectations, the...

This paper develops a simple analytical framework to study the impact of central bank policy-rate changes on banks’ credit supply and risk-taking incentives. Unobservable expost bank monitoring of loans creates an external-financing constraint, which determines bank leverage. Unobservable,...

Research with Keynesian-style models has emphasized the importance of the output gap for policies aimed at controlling inflation while declaring monetary aggregates largely irrelevant. Critics, however, have argued that these models need to be modified to account for observed money growth and...

Do negative policy rates hinder banks' transmission of monetary policy? To answer this question, we examine the behaviour of Italian mortgage lenders using a novel loan-level dataset. When policy rates turn negative, banks with higher ratios of retail overnight deposits to total assets charge...

Estimations of simple monetary policy rules are often very rigid. Standard practice requires that a decision is made as to which indicators the central bank is assumed to respond to, ignoring the data-rich environment in which policy-makers typically form their decisions. However, the choice of...

Transparency has become an almost universal virtue among central banks. The paper tests empirically, for the case of the Federal Reserve, two hypotheses about central bank transparency derived from the debate of Morris and Shin (2002) and Svensson (2006). First, the paper finds that the...