This article shows that the "risk premium" shock in Smets and Wouters (2007) can be interpreted as a structural shock to the demand for safe and liquid assets such as short-term US Treasury securities. Several implications of this interpretation are discussed.

The European Central Bank (ECB), as part of its forward-looking strategy, needs high-quality financial market statistical indicators as a means to facilitate evidence-based and sound decision-making. Such indicators include timely market intelligence and information to gauge investors'...

We present an incomplete markets model to understand the costs and benefits of increasing government debt in a low interest rate environment. Higher risk increases the demand for safe assets, lowering the natural rate of interest below zero, constraining monetary policy at the zero lower bound,...

During and after the Great Recession of 2008-09, conventional monetary policy in the United States and many other advanced economies was constrained by the effective lower bound (ELB) on nominal interest rates. Several central banks implemented large-scale asset purchase (LSAP) programs, more...

Walter Bagehot's putative principles of lending in liquidity crises - to lend freely to solvent banks with good collateral but at penalty rates - have served as a theoretical basis for thinking about the lender of last resort for close to 100 years, while simultaneously providing justification...

The objective of this study is to analyze current and likely future impacts of the issuance of New Turkish lira (YTL) denominated borrowing instruments by many global financial institutions around the major financial centres. These bonds are strong source of evidence for international confidence...

We construct the first measure of collateral re-use at the bank and bond level for the European repo market using a regulatory transaction dataset. We show that banks materially increase the rate of re-use in response to tightened asset scarcity induced by the Eurosystem's asset purchase...

The reuse of collateral can support the efficient allocation of assets in the financial system. Exploiting a novel dataset, we quantify banks’ collateral reuse at the security level. We show that banks substantially increase their reuse of collateral in response to scarcity induced by central...

Do emerging markets need to sacrifice economic sovereignty in order to borrow more cheaply on the international capital markets? To explore this, we exploit a natural experiment following the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 when four Balkan states - Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia - received full...

Can competing stablecoins produce efficient and stable outcomes? We study competition among stablecoins pegged to a stable currency. They are backed by interest-bearing safe assets and can be redeemed with the issuer or traded in a secondary market. If an issuer sticks to an appropriate...