This paper combines qualitative information from the Eurosystem Bank Lending Survey with micro-data on loan prices and quantities for the participating Italian banks to assess the role of supply and demand factors in credit developments, with a focus on the sharp slowdown of 2008-09. Both demand...

Changes in interest rates constitute a major source of risk for banks' business activity and can diversely affect their financial conditions and performance. We use a unique dataset to analyse Italian banks' exposure to interest rate risk during the crisis, relying on the standardized duration...

This paper explores the effect of taxation on the capital structure of banks. For identification, we exploit exogenous regional variations in the rate of the Italian tax on productive activities (IRAP) using administrative, confidential data on regional banks provided by the Bank of Italy...

Inflation in the euro area has been falling since mid-2013, turned negative at the end of 2014 and remained below target thereafter. This paper employs a Bayesian VAR to quantify the contribution of a set of structural shocks, identified by means of sign restrictions, to inflation and economic...

We consider an economy in which the oil costs, industrial production, and other macroeconomic variables fluctuate in response to fundamental domestic and external demand and supply shocks. We estimate the effects of these structural shocks on US monthly data for the 1973.1-2007.12 period using...

The prominent role assigned to money by the ECB has been the subject of an intense debate because of the declining predictive power of the monetary aggregate M3 for inflation in recent years. This paper reassesses the information content of monetary analysis for future inflation using dynamic...

The prices of futures contracts on short-term interest rates are commonly used by central banks to gauge market expectations concerning monetary policy decisions. Excess returns - the difference between futures rates and the realized rates - are positive, on average, and statistically...

Using a new monthly dataset on bank-level lending rates, we study the transmission of conventional and unconventional monetary policy in the euro area via shifts in the supply of credit. We find that a bank lending channel is operational for both types of measures, though its functioning...