This paper investigates the sensitivity of the demand for safe government debt to currency unhedged and hedged excess returns in a sample of US mutual funds. We find evidence of active rebalancing towards government bonds that offer relatively higher returns on an unhedged basis, in particular...

Traditionally, insurers are seen as stabilisers of financial markets that act countercyclically by buying assets whose price falls. Recent studies challenge this view by providing empirical evidence of procyclicality. This paper sheds new light on the underlying reasons for these opposing views....

Using security-by-security data on investor holdings in the euro area, we study run dynamics across different fund-shares of the same fund during the unprecedented liquidity crisis in March 2020. For an average bond or equity mutual fund-share, households, other euro area funds, and the foreign...

The market turmoil in March 2020 highlighted key vulnerabilities in the EU money market fund (MMF) sector. This paper assesses the effectiveness of the EU's regulatory framework from a financial stability perspective, based on a panel analysis of EU MMFs at a daily frequency. First, we find that...

The euro area insurance sector and its relevance for real economy financing have grown significantly over the last two decades. This paper analyses the effects of monetary policy on the size and composition of insurers' balance sheets, as well as the implications of these effects for financial...

Using supervisory data of alternative investment funds investing in bonds, I exploit the COVID-19 crisis to examine the effectiveness of redemption restrictions from a financial stability perspective. First, I find that redemption restrictions reduced outflows during the March 2020 market...

Central banks increasingly act as market-makers-of-last-resort, yet the impact and exit of such interventions remain poorly understood. Using euro-area data, we analyze the cycle of market freeze, intervention, and exit in short-term debt markets. A run on money market funds (MMFs) triggered a...

Overlapping portfolios constitute a well-recognised source of risk, providing a channel for financial contagion induced by the market price impact of asset deleveraging. We introduce a novel method to assess the market price impact on a security-by-security basis from historical daily traded...

Specialness - the premium of procuring a specific security in the repo market - increased in the second half of 2011 for Italian government bonds. We assess the impact on specialness of the outright purchase program of the Eurosystem during the same period. Bonds bought by the Eurosystem had...

We use outages as natural experiments to study sovereign bond market functioning. When the euro area futures market goes down, trading activity on the cash market declines, liquidity evaporates, and transaction prices deviate from fundamental values. Tracing back this macro-level market...