We examine whether the ECB’s Securities Markets Programme (SMP) was effective in reversing or stabilising adverse movements in Irish sovereign yields. Our initial analysis examines whether daily yield movements responded significantly to interventions. At the daily frequency we find no...

We examine transparency-related characteristics of European and US sovereign bond markets and relate these to differences in primary issuance approaches and the design of the different trading platforms. We highlight the existence of a winner’s curse problem in the interaction between B2C and...

The financial turmoil that began in mid-2007 produced severe stress in interbank markets and prompted significant changes in central banks’ funding operations. We examine the changing characteristics of ECB official interventions through the crisis and assess how they affected the efficiency...

It is generally accepted that excessive exuberance or gloom in investor sentiment contributes to booms and crashes in share prices. However, views differ on the merits of active policy intervention due to gaps in our understanding of the transmission mechanism. To fill this gap we apply a fully...

We examine the relationship between monetary policy operations and interbank trading of funds using sovereign bonds as collateral. We first establish that, in the pre-crisis period, there are important but rather weak relations between these funding sources and that this relationship varies...