Not since the Great Depression have monetary policy matters and institutions weighed so heavily in commercial, financial, and political arenas. Apart from the eurozone crisis and global monetary policy issues, for nearly two years all else has counted for little more than noise on a relative...

After the dramatic rescue package for the euro area, the governing council of the European Central Bank decided to purchase European government bonds - to ensure an "orderly monetary policy transmission mechanism". Many observers argued that, by bond purchases, national fiscal policies could...

With a unique loan portfolio maintained by a top-20 universal bank in Germany, this study tests whether unconventional monetary policy by the European Central Bank (ECB) reduced corporate borrowing costs. We decompose corporate lending rates into refinancing costs, as determined by money...

We derive four sets of counterfactual national interest rate paths for the 17 Euro Area countries for the time period 1999 to 2012. They approximate desirable national interest rates countries would have liked to implement if they could still conduct independent monetary policy. We find that...

This paper explores the potential effectiveness of the ECBś Outright Monetary Transaction (OMT) program in safeguarding an appropriate monetary policy transmission. Since the program aims at manipulating bank lending rates by conducting sovereign bond purchases on secondary markets, a stable...

After the dramatic rescue package for the euro area, the governing council of the European Central Bank decided to purchase European government bonds – to ensure an “orderly monetary policy transmission mechanism”. Many observers argued that, by bond purchases, national fiscal policies...

This paper compares the performance of economies with different monetary regimes during the last quarter century. The conclusions include: (1) There is little evidence that inflation targeting affects performance in advanced economies, but some evidence of benefits in emerging economies; (2)...

Im Euroraum wird die Einführung eines digitalen Euro bereits seit Längerem diskutiert. Die Untersuchungsphase der Europäischen Zentralbank lief bereits seit Oktober 2021 und ging im Oktober 2023 in eine Vorbereitungsphase über. In anderen Ländern wird digitales Zentralbankgeld bereits...

The European Central Bank (ECB) wants to push ahead with the "digital euro" project. However, the digital euro is by nomeans the only and possibly not even a good (let alone the best) way to respond to the comprehensive change in the world of money. Interms of its reputation, the ECB must act...

Since 2009, European central bankers have supported some reforms, in order to draw roadmaps to get out of the euro debt crisis. This paper tests whether the educational and professional background of European central bankers matter for the type of reforms each of them advocated. Through a...