This paper offers a comprehensive comparison of the structure of banking and financial markets in the euro area. Based on this, several hypotheses about the role of banks in monetary policy transmission are developed. Many of the predictions that have been proposed for the U.S. are deemed...

The euro has had a difficult second decade but the project has still had some important successes. The common currency is popular among the euro area's citizens, intra-European exchange rate instability has been removed and the ECB has successfully achieved its primary goal of price stability....

We use a bank-level data set to examine the behaviour of central bank reserves in the euro area banking system over the course of the ECB QE programme. Previous research on QE has generally paid little attention to the role of reserve dynamics within the banking system and some have assumed that...

We find evidence of a bank lending channel for the euro area operating via bank risk. Financial innovation and the new ways to transfer credit risk have tended to diminish the informational content of standard bank balance-sheet indicators. We show that bank risk conditions, as perceived by...

This paper investigates the relationship between short-term interest rates and bank risk. Using a unique database that includes quarterly balance sheet information for listed banks operating in the European Union and the United States in the last decade, we find evidence that unusually low...