Before 1893 the regional branches of Norges Bank set their own bank rates. We discuss how bank rate autonomy could be reconciled with the fixed exchange rate commitments of the silver and gold standard. Although the headquarters of the bank was in Trondhjem, we find that the Christiania branch...

Virtual currencies are a contemporary form of private money. Thanks to their technological properties, their global transaction networks are relatively safe, transparent, and fast. This gives them good prospects for further development. However, they remain unlikely to challenge the dominant...

According to the classical view, an economy's lender of last resort should be its central bank. For brief periods of time, the bank might suspend convertibility in order to provide the liquidity needed to support the domestic credit market. Recent experience of financial crises demonstrates the...

Under what conditions can policymakers make demonstrably poor policy choices? By providing a new account of monetary policy management in the Netherlands during the interwar gold standard, we show how policymakers can fail to escape their long-held beliefs and refuse to consider available policy...

I study whether monetary gold hoarding was the main cause of the Great Depression in a structural VAR analysis. The notion that monetary forces played an important role in bringing about the depression is well established in the narrative literature, but has more recently met some skepticism by...

This paper identifies bank-specific-characteristics and market conditions that contribute to determine prices and demand for liquidity in the interbank market as wells as banks' access to this market. Results indicate that riskier banks pay higher prices and borrow less liquidity, concurrent...

This paper examines the impact of exogenous liquidity shocks in the unsecured interbank market. We evaluate the effects of idiosyncratic liquidity shocks - arising from deposits outflow at the bank level - and of the aggregate liquidity shock related to the U.S. tapering observed between May and...

We estimate private costs in the Swedish banking sector for the production of payment services and investigate to what extent the price structure reflects the estimated cost structure. We find that (i) banks tend to use two-part tariffs but (ii) variable costs are poorly reflected in transaction...

Climate change can be a source of financial risk. This paper examines how credit rating agencies accepted by the Eurosystem incorporate climate change risk in their credit ratings. It also analyses how rating agencies disclose their assessments of climate change risks to rating users. The paper...

This paper investigates the behaviour of credit rating agencies (CRAs) using a natural experiment in monetary policy. Specifically, we exploit the corporate QE of the Eurosystem and its rating-based specific design which generates exogenous variation in the probability for a bond of becoming...