Economists and central bankers nowadays believe that forward guidance has become more important in a world in which key interest rates have hit their effective lower bounds (ELB). In case of the European Central Bank (ECB), this should have increased the informational content of the introductory...

The paper examines the bank lending activities of banks in a low interest rate environment. External financing of small- and medium-sized enterprises in the euro area primarily takes place via bank loans and not through capital markets. Based on the Bankscope database, bank balance sheet data is...

How do capital and liquidity buffers affect the evolution of bank loans in periods of financial and economic distress? To answer this question we study the responses of 219 individual banks to aggregate demand, standard and unconventional monetary policy shocks in the euro area between 2007 and...

In June 2018 the"Vollgeld" initiative will be submitted to the Swiss people. We contribute to the ongoing discussion of a sovereign money system, by providing a price-theoretic model for the money supply under a "Vollgeld"-system. As banks would no longer have the ability to create money, they...

The European Central Bank (ECB) recently became engaged in macro-prudential policies and the micro-prudential supervision of the largest Euro area banks. These new tasks should help complete financial integration, and make the Euro area more resilient to financial instability risks. However, the...

The recent wave of financial innovation, particularly innovation related to the application of information and communication technologies, poses a serious challenge to the financial industry's business model in both its banking and non-banking components. It has already revolutionised financial...

In the last decade, advanced economies, including the euro area, experienced deflationary pressures caused by the global financial crisis of 2007-2009 and the anti-crisis policies that followed - in particular, the new financial regulations (which led to a deep decline in the money multiplier)....

In this paper I investigate whether there is a systematic difference between conventional banks and participation banks in terms of their response to monetary policy shocks. For this purpose I look at the quarterly loan growth of commercial banks and participation banks in Turkish banking sector...

In this paper, we provide evidence for a risk-taking channel of monetary policy transmission in the euro area that works through the relaxation of lending standards for borrowers. Our dataset covers the period 2003Q1-2016Q2 and includes, in addition to the standard variables for real GDP growth,...

Exploiting a granular dataset of banks' security holdings I assess the impact of unconventional monetary policy on bank lending and security holdings. Using a difference-in-differences regression setup and holding the security composition of each bank constant at its level in January 2014, well...