After the global financial crisis and during the European sovereign debt crisis, bank lending to companies in the euro area slowed down dramatically bringing the economy close to a credit crunch. It was only after the start of the ECB’s quantitative easing programme in early 2015 that bank...

In the past decade, central banks worldwide started to face new challenges: Rather than preventing too high inflation rates, monetary policy makers started to worry about too low inflation. Very low and even negative policy rates and large balance sheet expansion together with unconventional...