In this paper a new instrument for monetary policy shocks is presented. Exogenous variation of the policy rate may come from frictions of collective decision-making. Dissenting votes indicate how far the final decision of the decision making body is from the mean of the members' individually...

Welfare gains from increasing product variety are an important source of the gains from international trade. Recent empirical studies have largely focused on measuring the gains from an increased variety of imports. Trade theory, however, suggests that international trade heavily affects the...

Building on previous research, we study banks' balance sheet year-end patterns in the European Union (EU) to assess the impact on supervisory measures of their systemic importance. We find that some global systemically important banks (G-SIBs) in the EU compress their balance sheet at year-end...

The phenomenal growth of cryptocurrencies raises important questions about their footprint on the financial system. What role are traditional financial intermediaries playing in cryptocurrency markets and what drives their engagement? Are new nodes emerging? We help answer these questions by...

Alongside other non-bank financial intermediaries, open-ended funds that invest in bonds ("bond OEFs") have grown rapidly over the past two decades. Besides their size, their business model and role in recent events suggest that bond OEFs can amplify stress in financial markets. The March 2020...

In order to analyze the pricing of portfolio credit risk – as revealed by tranche spreads of a popular credit default swap (CDS) index – we extract risk-neutral probabilities of default (PDs) and physical asset return correlations from single-name CDS spreads. The time profile and overall...

While corporate credit losses have been low since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, their future evolution is quite uncertain. Using a forecasting model with a solid track record, we find that the baseline scenario ("expected losses") is benign up to 2024. This is due to policy support...

Extending a standard credit-risk model illustrates that a single factor can drive both expected losses and the extent to which they may be exceeded in extreme scenarios, ie "unexpected losses." This leads us to develop a framework for forecasting these losses jointly. In an application to...

A parsimonious extension of a well-known portfolio credit-risk model allows us to study a salient stylized fact - abrupt switches between high- and low-loss phases - from a risk-management perspective. As uncertainty about phase switches increases, expected losses decouple from unexpected...

The financial sector has a key role to play in supporting the green transition. It is unrealistic to expect financial markets to induce the green transition unless the right signals come from the real economy. Unrealistic expectations can set the financial sector up for failure and derail the...