In this paper we assess to what extent in the existence of a financial crisis, government spending can contribute to mitigate economic downturns in the short run and whether such impact differs in crisis and non crisis times. We use panel analysis for a set of OECD and non-OECD countries for the...

We study fiscal behaviour and the sovereign yield curve in the U.S. and Germany in the period 1981:I-2009:IV. The latent factors, level, slope and curvature, obtained with the Kalman filter, are used in a VAR with macro and fiscal variables, controlling for financial stress conditions. In the...

We use a threshold VAR analysis to study whether the effects of fiscal policy on economic activity differ depending on financial market conditions. In particular, we investigate the possibility of a non-linear propagation of fiscal developments according to different financial market stress...

The response of major central banks to the global financial crisis has revived the debate around the interactions between monetary policy (MP) and bank stability. This technical paper sheds light, quantitatively, on the different mechanisms underlying the relationship between MP and bank...

This paper employs individual bidding data to analyze the empirical performance of the longer term refinancing operations (LTROs) of the European Central Bank (ECB). We investigate how banks’ bidding behavior is related to a series of exogenous variables such as collateral costs, interest...

This paper explains to what extent excess reserves are and should be relevant today in the implementation of monetary policy, focusing on the specific case of the operational framework of the Eurosystem. In particular, this paper studies the impact that changes to the operational framework for...

Before 1914, there was little doubt that central bank policy meant first of all control of short term interest rates. This changed dramatically in the early 1920s with the birth of “reserve position doctrine” (RPD) in the US, according to which a central bank should, via open market...

This paper explores the role of central bank capital in ensuring that central banks focus on price stability in monetary policy decisions. The paper goes beyond the existing literature on this topic by developing a simple, but comprehensive, model of the relationship between a central bank's...

We study how financial market efficiency affects a measure of diversification of output across industrial sectors borrowed from the portfolio allocation literature. Using data on sector-level value added for a wide cross section of countries and for various levels of disaggregation, we construct...

We study the effect of interbank market integration on small firm finance in the build-up to the 2007-2008 financial crisis. We use a comprehensive data set that contains contract terms on individual loans to 6,047 firms across 14 European countries between 1998:01 and 2005:12. We account for...