This paper provides a first preliminary assessment of the recent two 3-year long-term refinancing operations (3Y LTROs) conducted by the ECB by putting them into a broader context. The perspective taken is that prevailing in the first half of the year 2012, directly after the path-breaking ECB...

The paper examines the bank lending activities of banks in a low interest rate environment. External financing of small- and medium-sized enterprises in the euro area primarily takes place via bank loans and not through capital markets. Based on the Bankscope database, bank balance sheet data is...

We analyze the ECB Governing Council’s voting procedures. The literature has by now discussed numerous aspects of the rotation model but does not account for many institutional aspects of the voting procedure of the GC. Using the randomization scheme based on the multilinear extension (MLE) of...