This paper explores whether there are systematic patterns as to when members of the decision-making committees of the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank communicate with the public, and under what circumstances such communication has the ability to move financial...

Monetary policy communication is particularly important during unconventional times, because high uncertainty about the economy, the introduction of new policy tools and possible limits to the central bank 's toolkit could hamper the predictability of policy actions. We study how monetary policy...

This paper investigates the impact of the capital relief package adopted to support euro area banks at the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. By leveraging confidential supervisory and credit register data, we uncover two main findings. First, capital relief measures support banks' capacity to...

At the onset of the Covid-19 outbreak, central banks and supervisors introduced dividend restrictions as a new policy instrument aimed at supporting lending to the real economy and strengthening banks' capacity to absorb losses. In this paper we estimate the impact of the ECB's dividend...

While regulatory capital buffers are expected to be drawn to absorb losses and meet credit demand during crises, this paper shows that banks were unwilling to do so during the pandemic. To the contrary, banks engaged in forms of pro-cyclical behaviour to preserve capital ratios. By employing...

We investigate the impact of macroprudential capital requirements on bank lending behaviour across economic sectors, focusing on their potentially heterogenous effects and transmission channel. By employing confidential loan-level data for the euro area over 2015-18, we find that the reaction of...

We ask whether recent changes in monetary policy due to the financial crisis will be temporary or permanent. We present evidence from two surveys - one of central bank governors, the other of academic specialists. We find that central banks in crisis countries are more likely to have resorted to...

Central banks have used different types of forward guidance, where the forward guidance horizon is related to a state contingency, a calendar date or left open-ended. This paper reports cross-country evidence on the impact of these different types of forward guidance on the sensitivity of bond...

Do negative interest rates affect banks' cost efficiency? We exploit the unprecedented introduction of negative policy interest rates in the euro area to investigate whether banks make a virtue out of necessity in reacting to negative interest rates by adjusting their cost efficiency. We find...