This paper studies the role of international investment funds in the transmission of global financial conditions to the euro area using structural Bayesian vector auto regressions. While cross-border banking sector capital flows receded significantly in the aftermath of the global financial...

We study the role and the interaction of the quality of institutions and of counter-cyclical policies in leaning against the Global Financial Cycle (GFC) in Emerging Economies (EMEs). We show that heteroegeneity in institutional strength is a key determinant of the different effects of the GFC...

In the policy debate on the effectiveness of the Global Financial Safety Net, concerns have been raised that expectations of adverse effects of IMF programmes may deter countries from asking for an IMF programme when they need one, a form of "IMF stigma". We explore the existence of IMF...

Almost two decades after the introduction of the common currency, differences in institutional frameworks remain a major source of cross-country heterogeneity in the eurozone. We develop a two-country model with incomplete international markets in which the availability of credit depends on the...

We present a two-country model with an enhanced banking sector featuring risky lending and cross-border interbank market frictions. We find that (i) the strength of the financial accelerator, when applied to banks operating under uncertainty in an interbank market, will critically depend on the...

This paper analyses the incidence and severity of sudden stops in euro area countries before and after the introduction of the ECB's asset purchase programmes. We define sudden stops as abrupt declines in private net financial inflows, i.e. total flows adjusted for EU and IMF loans and changes...

We characterise the probability distributions of various categories of gross capital flows conditional on information contained in financial asset prices in a panel of emerging market economies, with a focus on "tail" events. Our framework, based on the quantile regression methodology, allows...

This paper documents the extension of the system-wide stress testing framework of the ECB with the insurance sector for a more thorough assessment of risks to financial stability. The special nature of insurers is captured by the modelling of the liability side and its loss absorbing capacity of...

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...