This note argues that in a situation of an inelastic natural gas supply a restrictive monetary policy in the euro zone could reduce the energy bill and therefore has additional merits. A more hawkish monetary policy may be able to indirectly use monopsony power on the gas market. The welfare...

It is well-known that interest rates are extremely persistent, yet they are best modeled and understood as stationary processes. These properties are contradictory in the workhorse Gaussian affine term structure model in which persistent data often result in unit roots that imply...

Over the last two decades the intensity of credit standards' tightening during economic contractions has exceeded their easing during expansions among euro area banks. This mechanism is fed by the boom-bust cycle of credit that, as much research has shown, is linked to financial instability with...