Central banks repo market operations and liquidity infusions occasion a structural liquidity mismatch in bank balance sheets and increase the dependence on central bank liquidity. This paper argues for what I term “Circular Monetary Economics”, an approach to monetary policy that seeks to...

Monetary policy transmission may be impaired if banks rebalance their portfolios towards securities. We identify the bank lending and risk-taking channels of monetary policy by exploiting – Italian's unique – credit and security registers. In crisis times, with higher ECB liquidity, less...

This paper analyzes the relationship between bank lending and the Federal Reserve's policy of paying interest on excess reserves (IOER). We argue that the Fed's IOER policy deviates from the standard interest-rate floor framework in ways that influence banks' incentives to hold loans and...

The Eurosystem's large-scale asset purchases (quantitative easing, QE) induce a strong and persistent increase in excess reserves in the euro area banking sector. These excess reserves are heterogeneously distributed across euro area countries. This paper develops a two-country New Keynesian...

During and after the Great Recession, the European Central Bank adopted unconventional monetary policies that are more or less uncontroversial in the literature. By contrast, its quantitative easing (QE) program that started in 2015 is highly disputed. The article evaluates the pros and cons of...

This is the fifth in a series of seven papers on interest rates and it covers the monetary policy models, a bank liquidity analysis, the concept of quantitative easing in terms of a bank liquidity analysis, and how a QE policy affects interest rates. The seven papers cover: (1) what are interest...

The excess liquidity in the euro area is a product of a long period of quantitative easing. It changed the operational framework of the European Central Bank (ECB)’s monetary policy from the scarce reserves system (SRS) to the abundant reserves system (ARS). To eliminate excess liquidity and...

This paper assesses how the financial system influences the strength of the liquidity effect in a calibrated limited participation model of the monetary transmission mechanism. The model suggests that bankbased systems should be characterized by smaller liquidity effects since monetary...