Legal provisions that protect politicians from arrest and prosecution exist throughout much of the modern democratic world. Why, and with what effects, do societies choose to place their politicians above the law? We examine the institution of immunity both theoretically and empirically. Our...

We study the performance of a group of foreign exchange reserve managers that are responsible for investing the ECB's official reserves in US dollars, for a value of around $43 billion, using a new dataset which includes detailed portfolio holdings from 2006 to 2010. The ECB reserve managers...

This paper studies the impact of major ECB monetary policy announcements on the portfolio allocation of euro area fund investors, using daily data between 2012 and mid-2016, a period that includes a variety of unconventional measures. We distinguish between active portfolio reallocation, driven...

Reserve portfolios prior to the Global Financial Crisis provided positive (low) returns for central banks or had extremely low probabilities of earning negative returns. In the wake of the crisis, expansionary monetary policy created a low yield environment at a scale that was never seen before....

To what extent can a central bank influence its own balance sheet credit risks during a financial crisis through unconventional monetary policy operations? To study this question we develop a risk measurement framework to infer the time-variation in portfolio credit risks at a high (weekly)...