Small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) of southern euro-area economies (e.g. Italy, Spain) pay significantly higher borrowing rates than their peers of the core (e.g. Germany, France) and this divergence is widening. It is argued that severe market failures prevent SMEs in southern euro area...

We study determinants of sovereign portfolios of Spanish banks over a long time-span, starting in 2008. Our findings challenge the view that banks engaged in moral hazard strategies to exploit the regulatory treatment of sovereign exposures. In particular, we show that being a weakly capitalized...

Without a Lender of Last Resort for government debt, multiple equilibria in bond markets may ensue where default emerges for non-fundamental reasons. The stabilising power of central bank interventions does not build on a real debt depreciation via inflation, but on a swap of bonds and central...

The European Council's decisions to implement the De Larosiere recommendations for a reformed approach to micro-level financial supervision and a new European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB) are to be welcomed. The ECB's central role in the ESRB is also to be welcomed. However, the limited role...

This paper develops a theory of the secondary market trading of financial securitities in which endogenous asset market dynamics generate periods of growing aggregate credit volumes and falling credit standards even in the absence of "financial shocks." Falling credit standards in turn lead to...

Failing to account for joint dynamics of credit and asset prices can be hazardous for countercyclical macroprudential policy. We show that composite financial cycles, emphasising expansions and contractions common to credit and asset prices, powerfully predict systemic banking crises. Further,...

I propose and estimate a dynamic model of financial intermediation to study the different roles of the condition of banks' and firms' balance sheets in real activity. The net worth of firms determines their borrowing capacity both from households and banks. Banks provide risky loans to multiple...

I estimate the comparative causal effects of monetary policy "leaning against the wind" (LAW) and macroprudential policy on bank-level lending and leverage by drawing on a single natural experiment. In 1920, when U.S. monetary policy was still decentralized, four Federal Reserve Banks...

This paper reconsiders the role of macroeconomic shocks and policies in determining the Great Recession and the subsequent recovery in the US. The Great Recession was mainly caused by a large demand shock and by the ZLB on the interest rate policy. In contrast with previous findings, the...