Some current account rebalancing within EMU is currently in progress. Following the financial crisis, German current account surpluses with Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece have decreased. The following article shows that rebalancing has been achieved mainly at the expense of domestic demand in...

Does leverage drive investor flows in bond mutual funds? Leverage can increase fund returns in good times, but it can also magnify investors' losses and their response to bad performance. We study bond fund flows to provide new evidence for the link between mutual fund leverage and financial...

This joint ECB-DNB Occasional Paper aims to inform the ongoing discussions about an EU-level framework for operationalising macroprudential leverage limits for alternative investment funds (AIFs). It builds on, and extends, the analysis of an ECB-DNB special feature article published in the...

Using newly available information on euro area sectoral holdings of securities, this paper investigates to what extent the presence of institutional investors affects volatility and liquidity in secondary bank bond markets. We find that non-bank financial intermediaries, in particular money...

Using a unique dataset of appraised values and transaction prices, this paper investigates whether systematic over-appraisals could have been at the heart of the 2005/2006 German open-end fund crisis. Because sold properties are valued more closely to market values than unsold properties, we...

This paper first highlights the structural features of shadow banking in the euro area, focusing on investment funds. It then discusses the potential systemic risks that the recent expansion of the investment fund sector presents. While investment funds provide important intermediation services...

Owing to the disruptive events in the shadow banking system during the global financial crisis, policymakers and regulators have sought to strengthen the monitoring framework and to identify any remaining regulatory gaps. In accordance with its mandate, the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB)...