Since 2008, excess liquidity - defined as the sum of holdings of central bank reserves in excess of reserve requirements and holdings of equivalent central bank deposits - has tended to accumulate in specific euro area countries and in a small, slowly changing group of credit institutions....

This paper proposes a new procedure to determine the time of the prevailing quote relative to the time of the trade for NYSE stock data obtained from the TAQ database. The procedure tests whether the quote revision frequency around a trade is contaminated by quote revisions triggered by a trade,...

We derive closed-form expressions for the optimal weighting matrix for GMM estimation of the stochastic volatility model with AR(1) log-volatility, and for the asymptotic covariance matrix of the resulting estimator. The moment conditions considered are generated by the absolute observations...

In the past few months, euro area money markets have been exposed to intense tensions. On 8 August, overnight interest rates rose to very high levels which required interventions of the Eurosystem in order to stabilise short-term money market interest rates around the target level, i.e. the...

The article discusses the relationship between the central bank balance sheet, the monetary base, monetary aggregates and credit in the euro area. In particular, it looks at the choice of the operational procedures available to the central bank, and for this purpose it compares the current...

This paper analyses changes in short-term interest rate expectations and uncertainty during ECB Governing Council days. For this purpose, it first extends the estimation of risk-neutral probability density functions up to tick frequency. In particular, the non-parametric estimator of these...

Policy impact studies often suffer from endogeneity problems. Consider the case of the ECB Securities Markets Programme: If Eurosystem interventions were triggered by sudden and strong price deteriorations, looking at daily price changes may bias downwards the correlation between yields and the...