Does banks' exposure to interest rate risk change when interest rates are very low or even negative? Using a high-frequency event study methodology and intraday data, we find that the effect of surprise interest rate cuts announced by the ECB on European bank equity values - an effect that is...

With the use of nontraditional policy tools, the level of reserve balances has risen significantly in the United States since 2007. Before the financial crisis, reserve balances were roughly $20 billion whereas the level has risen well past $1 trillion. The effect of reserve balances in simple...

This paper views the policy response to the recent financial crisis from the perspective of Milton Friedman's monetary economics. Five major aspects of the policy response are: 1) discount window lending has been provided broadly to the financial system, at rates low relative to the market rates...

Central banks typically control an overnight interest rate as their policy tool, and the transmission of monetary policy happens through the relationship of this overnight rate to the rest of the yield curve. The expectations hypothesis, that longer-term rates should equal expected future...

This paper examines whether monetary policy pass-through to mortgage interest rates affects household fertility decisions. Using administrative data on mortgages and births in the UK, our empirical strategy exploits variation in the timing of when families were eligible for a rate adjustment,...

This paper examines how monetary policy affects the riskiness of the financial sector's aggregate balance sheet, a mechanism referred to as the risk channel of monetary policy. I study the risk channel in a DSGE model with nominal frictions and a banking sector that can issue both outside equity...

This paper empirically identifies an important channel through which monetary policy affects consumer spending: homeowner balance sheets. A monetary loosening increases home values, thereby strengthening homeowner balance sheets and stimulating household spending due to a combination of...

We examine the role of U.S. monetary policy in global financial stability by using a cross-country database spanning the period from 1870-2010 across 69 countries. U.S. monetary policy tightening increases the probability of banking crises for those countries with direct linkages to the U.S.,...

US monetary policy was constrained from 2008 to 2015 by the zero lower bound, during which the Federal Reserve would likely have lowered the federal funds rate further if it were able to. This paper uses industry-level data to examine how growth was affected. Despite the zero bound constraint,...

We empirically assess the effect of reserve accumulation as a result of quantitative easing (QE) on bank-level lending and risk taking activity. To overcome the endogeneity of bank-level reserve holdings to banks' other portfolio decisions, we employ instruments made available by a regulatory...