Central banks have been blamed for the negative side effects of the non-conventional monetary policy measures they have implemented since 2008. In this paper, we argue that central banks played a positive role in the money market and interbank liquidity recovery. Using novel, micro data of the...

The fixed rate tender is one of the main operational formats used by central banks in the implementation of their monetary policies. While academic research has largely dismissed the procedure for its tendency to encourage overbidding, central banks such as the ECB and the Bank of England have...

The liquidity of financial system plays a central role in systemic crises. In this paper, we show that the ECB haircut policies provided an important liquidity support to distressed financial institutions during the euro area sovereign debt turmoil. Using novel, micro data on the pool of...

It has been argued in the literature that emergency liquidity injections should be conducted preferably in the form of open market operations. As we show in the present paper, this is not necessarily the case when liquidity may be alternatively used for speculative purposes during the crisis. In...

We study the problem of a leveraged investor that is forced to unwind a significant fraction of its portfolio in a collection of illiquid markets. It is shown that markets may become disrupted in response to a relatively small liquidity shock. As a consequence, the probability of default can be...