We examine whether central banks’ voting records help predict the future course of monetary policy in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom, controlling for financial market expectations. Unlike previous research, first, we examine the period of the global...

We use a Smooth Transition Conditional Correlation GARCH (STCC-GARCH) model applied to the euro area monetary policy rates and sovereign yields of Italy, Spain and Germany at 5-year maturity to estimate the threshold level of the signals above which the sovereign bond market moves to a crisis...

Using individual data from the Eurosystem’s liquidity providing tenders for the pre-crisis period we investigate banks’ joint bidding behaviour in Main Refinancing Operation (MRO) and Longer Term Refinancing Operations (LTRO). We test whether banks bid at lower rates in MROs before the LTRO...

The paper analyzes developments in TARGET2 imbalances within the euro area since 2007, from two perspectives: national central banks� balance sheets and countries� balance of payments (BoP). We examine the relationship between TARGET2 balances and the Eurosystem liquidity provision,...

This paper reviews the main literature and evidence on the relevance of fiscal dominance in Italy in the last part of the 20th century and examines the evolution of the techniques of Treasury financing and of monetary targets. In the early 1970s budget deficits and monetary base creation were...

We review the recent literature on macroprudential policy and its interaction with other policies, extracting several points. First, there are externalities in the financial sector, often in the form of excessive credit growth. Second, monetary policy needs to take financial stability into...

Monetary policy has real effects through credit supply and demand, and since these changes are mostly unobserved, the complete identification of the credit channel is generally unfeasible. Bank lending surveys by central banks, however, contain reliable quarterly information on changes in loan...

Many countries have undertaken central-bank independence reforms, but the years of implementation differ. What explains such differences in timing? This is of interest more broadly, as it sheds light on factors that matter for the speed at which economic reforms come about. We study a rich set...

This paper evaluates the macroeconomic effects of simultaneously implementing fiscal consolidation and competition-friendly reforms in a country of the euro area by simulating a large-scale dynamic general equilibrium model. We find, first, that the joint implementation of reforms has additional...

In the aftermath of the recent financial crisis and subsequent recession, slow recoveries have been observed and slowdowns in total factor productivity (TFP) growth have been measured in many economies. This paper develops a model that can describe a slow recovery resulting from an adverse...