This paper studies the impact of credit rating agency (CRA) announcements on the value of the Euro and the yields of French, Italian, German and Spanish long-term sovereign bonds during the culmination of the Eurozone debt crisis in 2011-2012. The employed GARCH models show that CRA downgrade...

This paper analyzes sovereign risk contagion in the Eurozone using an extension to the canonical model for contagion proposed by Pesaran and Pick (2007) and Metiu (2012) to allow for time-varying coefficients. This becomes necessary due to changes in the risk pricing of sovereign bonds since the...

Any empirical analysis of the credit channel faces a key identification challenge: changes in credit supply and demand are difficult to disentangle. To address this issue, we use the detailed answers from the US and the confidential and unique Euro area bank lending surveys. Embedding this...

We examine the implications of all three major ECB’s unconventional monetary policies, LTRO, asset purchase programs and deposit facility rate for bank investments among loans, government securities and cash deposited in central banks. Our results highlight that unconventional policies...

Since the European Central Bank’s (ECB’s) 2003 strategy review, the importance of macro-financial amplification channels for monetary policy has increasingly gained recognition. This paper takes stock of this evolution and discusses the desirability of further incremental enhancements in the...

Financial stability indicators can be grouped into financial stress indicators that reflect heightened spreads and market volatility, and financial vulnerability indicators that reflect credit and asset price imbalances. Based on a panel of euro area countries, we show that both types of...

The financial crisis has highlighted the need for models that can identify counterparty risk exposures and shock transmission processes at the systemic level. We use the euro area financial accounts (flow of funds) data to construct a sector-level network of bilateral balance sheet exposures and...

Euro-area sovereign bond and interbank interest rate spreads widened sharply in the 2007-2009 Global Financial Crisis and over the subsequent European Debt Crisis, greatly increasing financing costs. Such rate volatility could represent concerns over asset liquidity or issuer solvency. To...

The article summarises the findings obtained in the estimation of an economic crisis early warning model for the euro area countries. These findings show that monitoring five variables that may indicate the emergence of macro-financial imbalances – current account balance, unit labour costs...

This paper uses a unique dataset where credit rejections experienced by euro area firms are matched with firm and bank characteristics. This allows us to study simultaneously the role that bank and firm weakness had in the credit reduction observed in the euro area during the sovereign debt...