Major central banks often accept pooled individual corporate loans as collateral in their refinancing operations with credit institutions. Such "eligible" loans to firms therefore provide a liquidity advantage to the banks that originate them. Banks may in turn pass on this advantage to the...

Using a semi-structural approach, we jointly estimate time-varying national natural real rates of interest for the four largest economies of the euro area over 1999-2016 and discuss the associated challenges for the single monetary policy. We find evidence of an increased dispersion of real...

The recent boom in housing markets of most developed economies has spurred criticism that inflation targeting central banks may have neglected the build-up of financial imbalances. This paper provides a formal empirical test of such claims, using a standard program evaluation methodology to...