Most short-term interest rates in the Euro area are below the European Central Bank deposit facility rate, the rate at which the central bank remunerates banks' excess reserves. This unexpected development coincided with the start of the Public Sector Purchase Program (PSPP). In this paper, we...

We analyze the European Central Bank''s (ECB''s) response to the global financial crisis. Our results suggest that even during the crisis, the core part of ECB''s monetary policy transmission-from policy rates to market rates-has continued to operate, but at a decreased efficiency. We also find...

The main tasks of central banks are to secure price and financial stability. These objectives can, in times of crises, conflict with one another, and the central bank may have to renounce one of them in order to secure the other. In a monetary union, this trade-off can be exacerbated by the...