Capital adequacy regulations or quantity restrictions on bank portfolios put forward by the Basle Committee on Banking Supervision have virtually become an international standard of prudential regulation. Recent proposals aim at extending this approach to market risks, in particular to foreign...

This paper builds a framework to quantify the financial stability implications of climate-related transition risk in Colombia. We explore risks imposed on the banking system based on scenarios of an increase in the domestic carbon tax by using bank- and firm-level data. Focusing on the...

We estimate the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on business failures among small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) in seventeen countries using a large representative firm-level database. We use a simple model of firm cost-minimization and measure each firm's liquidity shortfall during and after...

European authorities introduced stringent lockdown measures in early 2020 to reduce the transmission of COVID-19. As the first wave of infection curves flattened and the outbreak appeared controlled, most countries started to reopen their economies albeit using diverse strategies. This paper...

Europe's high pre-existing level of financial development can partly account for the relatively smaller reach of fintech payment and lending activities compared to some other regions. But fintech activity is growing rapidly. Digital payment schemes are expanding within countries, although...

We reconsider the design of welfare-optimal monetary policy when financing frictions impair the supply of bank credit, and when the objectives set for monetary policy must be simple enough to be implementable and allow for effective accountability. We show that a flexible inflation targeting...

We compute government spending multipliers for the Euro Area (EA) contingent on the interestgrowth differential, the so-called r-g. Whether the fiscal shock occurs when r-g is positive or negative matters for the size of the multiplier. Median estimates vary conditional on the specification, but...

The spread of COVID-19, containment measures, and general uncertainty led to a sharp reduction in activity in the first half of 2020. Europe was hit particularly hard-the economic contraction in 2020 is estimated to have been among the largest in the world-with potentially severe repercussions...

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...

The UK has pledged to cut greenhouse gases 57 percent below 1990 levels by 2030, to be emisisons neutral by 2050, and to phase out internal combustion engine vehicles by 2030. Much progress has been made, but fully achieving these ambitious objectives with the current policy framework will be...