We study the impact of increasingly negative central bank policy rates on banks' propensity to become undercapitalized in a financial crisis ('SRisk'). We find that the risk impact of negative rates is moderate, and depends on banks' business models: Banks with diversified income streams are...

We study the impact of increasingly negative central bank policy rates on banks' propensity to become undercapitalized in a financial crisis (`SRisk'). We find that the risk impact of negative rates depends on banks' business models: Large banks with diversified income streams are perceived as...

We show that negative policy rates affect the supply of bank credit in a novel way. Banks are reluctant to pass on negative rates to depositors, which increases the funding cost of high-deposit banks, and reduces their net worth, relative to low-deposit banks. As a consequence, the introduction...

The recent negative interest rate policy (NIRP) and quantitative easing (QE) programme by the ECB have raised concerns about the pass-through of monetary policy. On the one hand, negative rates could lead to declining bank profitability making an expansionary monetary policy contractionary....

We analyze the effect of negative monetary policy rates on banks, using detailed supervisory information from Switzerland. For identification, we compare changes in the behavior of banks that had different fractions of their central bank reserves exempt from negative rates. More affected banks...