Following a period of subdued consumer price changes, inflation has recently surged to levels that are significantly impacting the behavior of households and firms. Although the underlying sources of inflation differ across major advanced economies, central banks have progressively tightened...

The main result of the quick reactions of the Federal Reserve (the Fed) and the European Central Bank (ECB) to the Covid-19 crisis are that more than 20% of their public debt is now held by these central banks and that the balance sheet of the ECB is now near 50% of GDP (33% for the Fed). Two...

The 2007-2008 financial crisis demonstrated both the responsibilities that central bankers, alongside other actors, bear for turbulences of this kind as well as how economics can be used to provide central bankers and governments with the understanding and tools that they need to prevent the...

Motivated by the financial crisis of 2007-2009 several papers have provided explanations for why liquidity may dry up during market stress. This paper also looks at this issue but focuses on the question as to why the liquidity crunch was not uniform across maturities. As funding pressures were...

We examine whether business groups' influence on cash holdings depends on ownership. Group affiliation can increase firms' agency costs or benefit firms by providing an internal capital market, especially in transition economies characterized by weak investor protection and difficult external...

We assess the impact of the corporate sector purchase programme (CSPP), the corporate arm of the ECB's quantitative easing, over its first year of activity (June 2016 - June 2017). Focusing on the primary bond market, we find evidence of a significant impact of the CSPP on yield spreads, both...

Can monetary stimulus boost corporate investment? We answer this question by studying ECB's 2011-2012 Longer-Term Refinancing Operations (LTROs), which provided cheap funding to Eurozone banks. We find that, relative to their non-Eurozone counterparts, Eurozone firms invested more after the...

We examine whether business groups’ influence on cash holdings depends on ownership. Group affiliation can increase firms’ agency costs or benefit firms by providing an internal capital market, especially in transition economies characterized by weak investor protection and difficult...

After the announcement of the corporate quantitative easing program by the European Central Bank, nonfinancial corporations timed the corporate bond market by shifting their issuance toward bonds that were eligible for the program. However, issuers of eligible bonds did not increase total...

During the COVID-19 crisis period, firms headquartered in high social trust US states perform better than their counterparts from the low social trust states. Stock returns over the crisis period are 3 to 4 percentage points higher, on average, if social trust increases by one standard...