We use an original monthly dataset of 131 individual euro area banks to examine the effectiveness and transmission mechanism of the Eurosystem's credit support policies since the start of the crisis. First, we show that these policies have indeed been succesful in stimulating the credit flow of...

The need to make and receive payments lies at the heart of every business. It could be a customer purchasing goods or services or a company making payments to its suppliers or a bank account holder transacting with his or her bank. The emergence of advanced information technologies has brought...

How do banks transmit long-term central bank liquidity injections to borrowers? We exploit unique variation in how the ECB's 2011-12 Long-Term Refinancing Operations (LTROs) affected lending to firms discontinuously across credit ratings (within banks) to make four contributions. (i) We show the...

This study analyses the policy measures taken in the euro area in response to the outbreak and the escalating diffusion of new coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. We focus on monetary, microprudential and macroprudential policies designed specifically to support bank lending conditions. For...

Islamic banking has crossed the milestone of forty years since the Dubai Islamic Bank and the Islamic Development Bank were established in 1975. Islamic banking windows, standalone Islamic banking systems and even full-fledged Islamic banks, are operating as a part of global finance industry in...

This paper explores the interface between central banks and cryptocurrencies. Focusing on the European Central Bank (ECB), it identifies the potential threats that the rise of cryptocurrencies would pose to the basic and ancillary tasks of the ECB, in particular, its monetary policy operations...

Throughout the crisis, the ECB implemented a number of unprecedented measures with a wider and wider reach. These measures included a decrease of the policy rate to virtually zero, the extension of the maturities of its liquidity providing operations, an expansion in total liquidity injected in...

Do macroprudential regulations on residential lending influence commercial lending behavior too? To answer this question, we identify the compositional changes in banks' supply of credit using the variation in their holdings of residential mortgages on which extra capital requirements were...

The recent financial crisis has been followed in Europe by a significant decrease in credit flows to non-financial enterprises. This paper investigates demand and supply of loans using data from surveys and company balance sheets. Our econometric analysis suggests that recent ECB policy has...

Bitcoin is a distributed system. The greatest dilemma it poses to the current legal and regulatory systems is that it is hardly possible to regulate a distributed network in a centralized fashion as decentralized permissionless blockchain-based cryptocurrencies are antithetical to the existing...