The recent crisis was characterized by massive illiquidity. This paper reviews what we know and don't know about illiquidity and all its friends: market freezes, fire sales, contagion, and ultimately insolvencies and bailouts. It first explains why liquidity cannot easily be apprehended through...

A central proposition in research on the role that banks play in the transmission mechanism is that monetary policy imparts a direct impact on deposits and that deposits, insofar as they constitute the supply of loanable funds, act as the driving force of bank lending. This paper argues that the...

This paper addresses the relevance of the bank lending channel in the transmission of monetary policy in Germany on the basis of a structural vector error correction model (VECM). In order to deal with the fundamental problem of identification we use restriction tests on cointegration vectors to...

Central banks, which used to be so secretive, are communicating more and more these days about their monetary policy. This development has proceeded hand in glove with a burgeoning new scholarly literature on the subject. The empirical evidence, reviewed selectively here, suggests that...

Few areas of monetary economics have been studied as extensively as the transmission mechanism. The literature on this topic has evolved substantially over the years, following the waxing and waning of conceptual frameworks and the changing characteristics of the financial system. In this paper,...

This paper investigates the effect of interest rate policy on stock marketbubbles and trading behavior in experimental asset markets. For this purpose, weintroduce the possibility of investing in interest bearing bonds to the classicallaboratory asset market design of Smith, Suchanek, and...

Size effects matter in banking. Typically, banking systems are dominated by a smallnumber of large players who are also active in a large range of countries and marketsegments. At the same time, there exist small and often regionally-focused financialinstitutions. This holds also for the German...

We study how the structure of housing finance affects the transmission of monetarypolicy shocks. We document three main facts: first, the features of residentialmortgage markets differ markedly across industrialized countries; second, and accordingto a wide range of indicators, the transmission...

We consider a simple extension of the basic new-Keynesian setup in which we relaxthe assumption of frictionless financial markets. In our economy, asymmetricinformation and default risk lead banks to optimally charge a lending rate above therisk-free rate. Our contribution is threefold. First,...

This paper proposes a model that links households and firms, as usual, by markets forfactors and goods and, additionally, by a banking sector that channels households’funds to firms and eliminates idiosyncratic risk. In equilibrium, agency costs and taxbenefits of corporate debt are equalizing...