Starting in June 2014, the European Central Bank (ECB) stepped up its monetary accommodation in order to counter a too prolonged period of low inflation in the euro area. This article offers a narrative of the monetary policy measures taken up to December 2016 and a review of the effects of...

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...

Our study extends the traditional pass-through literature by incorporating an error correction mechanism that is based on cointegration analyses allowing for structural breaks and symmetric as well as for a variety of asymmetric adjustment mechanisms. While some results of earlier pass-through...

This paper investigates the monetary transmission mechanism within the Euro area and is providing new evidence on the financial market side of the monetary mechanism in Europe. In particular, we examine the pass-through of money market rates to commercial bank lending rates by allowing for the...

This paper explains the European debt crisis not as a result of insufficient fiscal discipline but as the result of a constructional flaw of the EMU. The reason for this flaw are the diverging real interest rates in EMU countries, which trigger self-reinforcing debt-spirals in the presence of...