Over the last two decades the intensity of credit standards' tightening during economic contractions has exceeded their easing during expansions among euro area banks. This mechanism is fed by the boom-bust cycle of credit that, as much research has shown, is linked to financial instability with...

Credit standards reported in the Bank Lending Surveys (BLS) of the ECB summarize banks' sentiment about credit market tightness and they strongly co-move with credit growth. This paper builds a new external instrument which captures an exogenous source of variation in credit standards, in order...

Excessive heat and cold weather waves may affect economic activity through energy markets. Yet, if a clear distinction of those events from other sources of variation in the economy would help central banks in stabilizing inflation is a research question that lacks theoretical and empirical...