This paper studies the transmission of changes in short-term interest rates to longer-term government bond yields when interest rates are at very low levels or negative. We focus on Switzerland, where short-term interest rates have been at zero since late 2008 and negative since the beginning of...

Since the Great Recession, the main evolution in monetary policy has been its attempts to affect the medium and the long-term interest rates with instruments other than the policy rate. Consequently, measuring the stance of monetary policy by a single interest rate becomes problematic. This...

We propose a two-step approach to estimate multi-dimensional monetary policy shocks and their causal effects requiring only daily financial market data and policy events. First, we combine a heteroscedasticity-based identification scheme with recursive zero restrictions along the term structure...

Recent calculations have suggested that the German federal government has saved roughly EUR 90-100 billion, cumulatively, due to low bond yields since the onset of the Euro crisis. In order to determine the contribution of the "flight to quality" to this sum, we define the flight to quality as a...