In the aftermath of the financial crisis the Fed pursued a “near zero” overnight interest floor and initiatives to manipulate the size and composition of central bank assets. Bernanke referred to this policy as “credit easing.” I overview the succession of unconventional Fed measures...

This paper investigates how conventional and unconventional monetary policies announcements affect European banking indexes returns through an event-study analysis. We use data of 11 European banking indexes for the periods 1999-2015. We examine the state dependency of such effects and focus on...

Crises have cleansing effects: Low-quality firms face greater financial shortfalls and invest less than high-quality firms. Public liquidity support preserves the overall production capacity. However, by dampening the cleansing effects, it distorts the quality distribution and reduces the total...