This paper explores the potential effectiveness of the ECBś Outright Monetary Transaction (OMT) program in safeguarding an appropriate monetary policy transmission. Since the program aims at manipulating bank lending rates by conducting sovereign bond purchases on secondary markets, a stable...

This paper explains to what extent excess reserves are and should be relevant today in the implementation of monetary policy, focusing on the specific case of the operational framework of the Eurosystem. In particular, this paper studies the impact that changes to the operational framework for...

This paper provides an overview of the operational implementation of negative interest rates in Europe and Japan. Drawing attention to the fact that there is precedent for negative policy rates and negative money market rates, the paper addresses conceptual issues and summarizes measures which...

During and after the Great Recession, the European Central Bank adopted unconventional monetary policies that are more or less uncontroversial in the literature. By contrast, its quantitative easing (QE) program that started in 2015 is highly disputed. The article evaluates the pros and cons of...

The decision-making process in the ECB's Governing Council remains opaque as the ECB, in contrast to many other central banks, does not publish the votes for or against a policy proposal. In this paper, we construct an index of dissent based on the ECB presidents' answers to journalists'...