We study how banks manage their liquidity among the various assets at their disposal. We exploit the introduction of the ECB's two-tier system which heterogeneously reduced the cost of additional reserves holdings. We find that the treated banks increase reserve holdings by borrowing on the...

Protection buyers use derivatives to share risk with protection sellers, whose assets are only imperfectly pledgeable because of moral hazard. To mitigate moral hazard, privately optimal derivative contracts involve variation margins. When margins are called, protection sellers must liquidate...

This paper studies how banks' balance sheets and funding costs interact in the transmission of monetary-policy rates to banks' credit supply to firms. To do so, we use credit-registry data from Germany and Portugal together with the European Central Bank's policy-rate cuts in mid-2014. The...

In this paper, we survey the nascent literature on the transmission of negative policy rates. We discuss the theory of how the transmission depends on bank balance sheets, and how this changes once policy rates become negative. We review the growing evidence that negative policy rates are...

Using staggered corporate income tax changes across U.S. states, we show that taxes have a first-order effect on capital structure. Firms increase leverage by around 40 basis points for every percentage-point tax increase. Consistent with dynamic tradeoff theory, the effect is asymmetric:...

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...

The extended period of limited growth experienced until recently in many European countries raises the issue as to which policies could be most effective in improving their economic performance. This paper argues that further financial sector reforms may be a valuable complement to ongoing...

This paper studies how banks' balance sheets and funding costs interact in the transmission of monetary-policy rates to banks' credit supply to firms. To do so, we use credit-registry data from Germany and Portugal together with the European Central Bank's policy-rate cuts in mid-2014. The...

Almost ten years after the European Commission action plan on building a capital markets union (CMU) and despite incremental progress, e.g. in the form of the EU Listing Act, the picture looks dire. Stock exchanges, securities markets, and supervisory authorities remain largely national, and, in...