During the Global Financial Crisis, banks suffered losses on a scale not witnessed since the Great Depression, partly due to two major structural developments in the banking industry; deregulation combined with financial innovation. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the regulatory...

The experience of the Great Recession and its aftermath revealed that a lower bound on interestrates can be a serious obstacle for fighting recessions. However, the zero lower bound is not a law of nature;it is a policy choice. The central message of this paper is that with readily available...

Money market microstructure is fundamental to studying bank behaviour, to evaluating monetary policy and to assessing the financial stability of the system. Given the lack of granular data on interbank loans, Furfine (1999) proposed an algorithm to estimate the microstructure using data from the...

This paper documents the theoretical structure and empirical properties of the latestversion of the Global Macrofinancial Model (GFM). This dynamic stochastic generalequilibrium model of the world economy, disaggregated into forty national economies,was developed to support multilaterally...

In the age of high-frequency trading in financial markets and faster payment services in account-to-account (A2A) transactions of bank retail customers, it may seem odd that the shortest maturity that is traded in the money market is overnight. This situation reflects policies implemented by...

Do negative policy rates hinder banks' transmission of monetary policy? To answer this question, we examine the behaviour of Italian mortgage lenders using a novel loan-level dataset. When policy rates turn negative, banks with higher ratios of retail overnight deposits to total assets charge...

The current phase of low interest rates poses major challenges for banks. A continuous decline in the interest result, which is so important for the profitability of banks, has been observed for years, as it is becoming in-creasingly difficult for banks to generate sufficient income from the...

Fiat money requires no backing to be accepted at a uniquely determined positive value. I show this using an equilibrium model with realistic frictions and rational households allowed to freely interact in a competitive environment. The model portrays a modern 'cashless' economy relying on...

Estimates of the natural interest rate are often useful in the analysis of monetary and other macroeconomic policies. The topic gathered much attention following the great financial crisis and the Euro Area debt crisis due to the uncertainty regarding the timing of monetary policy normalization...

This paper builds a model-based dynamic monetary and fiscal conditions index (DMFCI) and uses it to examine the evolution of the joint stance of monetary and fiscal policies in the euro area (EA) and in its three largest member countries over the period 2007-2018. The index is based on the...