Negative interest rates remain a controversial policy for central banks. We study a novel signalling channel and ask under what conditions negative rates should exist in an optimal policymaker’s toolkit. We prove two necessary conditions for the optimality of negative rates: a time-consistent...

There have been heated debates on the negative interest rate policy (NIRP) since it was first introduced in major economies. Critics argue that deposit interest rates cannot break through the zero lower bound (ZLB) and that banks' interest margins can be heavily squeezed under the NIRP. The...

In the presence of negative monetary-policy rates and a zero lower bound on deposit rates, banks that are more exposed to central banks' asset-purchase programs reduce their lending to the real economy by more than their counterparts. When banks face a lower bound on customer deposit rates, an...