Inflation expectations constitute a subject of particular contemporary interest to central banks, especially those pursuing a monetary policy based on a strategy of direct inflation targeting. Macroeconomic theory indicates that the transmission of monetary policy impulses and their impact on...

This paper provides a simple weekly model of the regular supply of liquidity in the euro area, with a view to understanding the functioning of the euro area money market. The main result of the analysis is that liquidity has normally been provided by the ECB in a neutral and smooth manner, but...

On several occasions during the period 2001-2003, the European Central Bank (ECB) decided to deviate from its "neutral" benchmark allotment rule, with the effect of not alleviating a temporary liquidity shortage in the banking system. This is remarkable because it implied the possibility of...

This paper uses data on German government bond futures options to examine the behaviour of market expectations around monetary policy actions of the European Central Bank (ECB). In particular, this paper focuses on the asymmetries in bond market expectations, as measured by the skewness of...

Within a two-step GARCH framework we explore the linkages between equity returns of ten sectors in the euro area, the United States and Japan, respectively. Our estimation framework allows a distinction to be made between spillover effects originating from one of the three currency areas and...

This paper uses the co-incidence of extreme shocks to banksu0092 risk to examine within country and across country contagion among large EU banks. Banksu0092 risk is measured by the first difference of weekly distances to default and abnormal returns. Using Monte Carlo simulations, the paper...

Traditional Taylor rules, which are estimated using a level specification linking the short-term interest rate to inflation and the output gap, are unstable when estimated on euro area data and forecast poorly out of sample. We present an alternative reaction function which takes the...

The paper proposes a multi-factor international asset pricing model in which the exchange rate is allowed to be co-determined by a risk factor imperfectly correlated to other priced risks in the economy. The significance of this factor can be established as long as one is able to observe a proxy...

This paper investigates the performance of optimised interest rate rules when there is uncertainty about a key determinant of the monetary transmission mechanism, namely the degree of persistence characterising the inflation process. The paper focuses on the euro area and utilises two variants of...

Announcing a quantitative objective for price developments has become a common practice in modern monetary policy making. While the specific features of such announced objectives vary across countries, a common rationale for this is to help anchoring inflation expectations. We use survey data on...