Existing payment systems get more and more disrupted. As a consequence of the global trend of digitizing payments and generating new business models from the use of blockchain-based digital programmable money, several new payment initiatives have been announced recently. Besides “classical”...

Distributed ledger technology (DLT) enables a wide range of innovative industrial use cases and business models, such as through programmable payments and the seamless exchange of assets, goods, and services. To exploit the full potential of a DLT-based European economy, it is crucial to...

The digital euro is not a monolithic project. On the contrary: The fields of application are broad, and possible solutions are diverse. This paper provides an overview of use cases, application domains, and infrastructures for the digital euro that differ significantly. A comparison with...

Central bankers express concerns that central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) might disintermediate commercial banks and facilitate bank runs. We analyze these concerns in a DSGE framework and provide a rationale for the disintermediation of the banking sector. Our focus is on the central bank's...

This paper analyzes the interest rate setting of the European Central Bank (ECB) both before and after the outbreak of the global financial crisis. In the current monetary policy literature, researchers typically select one Taylor rule-based model in order to analyze the interest rate setting of...