Transaction cost shocks in financial markets are known to affect asset prices. This paper analyses how changes in transaction costs may affect the value of assets that banks use to collateralise borrowings in monetary policy operations. Based on a simple asset pricing model and employing a...

Savings accounts are owned by most households, but little is known about the performance of households' investments. We create a unique dataset by matching information on individual savings accounts from the DNB Household Survey with market data on account-specific interest rates and...

The ECB has collected data on the unrealised losses of significant institutions under its direct supervision with a view to enhancing the assessment of risk in the held-to-maturity portfolios of euro area banks and to furthering its monitoring of interest rate risk and liquidity risk.

This paper investigates whether global investors are over or under exposed towards the euro area and the role of home bias and institutions at home in shaping this exposure. According to a simple benchmark from standard portfolio theory, euro area investors - in particular those from euro area...

We use a unique dataset with bank clients' security holdings for all German banks to examine how macroeconomic shocks affect asset allocation preferences of households and non-financial firms. Our analysis focuses on two alternative mechanisms which can influence portfolio choice: wealth shocks,...

The regulatory use of banks' internal models aims at making capital requirements more accurate and reducing regulatory arbitrage, but may also give banks incentives to choose their risk models strategically. Current policy answers to this problem include the use of risk-weight floors and...

Assessing European financial integration has proved difficult because of complex financial intermediation activities carried out in some European financial centres (Ireland, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands) whose scale has grown enormously over time. We refer to these three countries as "onshore...

We examine empirically the role of high-frequency traders (HFTs) in price discovery and price efficiency. Based on our methodology, we find overall that HFTs facilitate price efficiency by trading in the direction of permanent price changes and in the opposite direction of transitory pricing...

In a famous episode of financial history which lasted over eight years, the market for the future on the Bund moved entirely from LIFFE, a London-based derivatives exchange, to DTB, a Frankfurt-based exchange. This paper studies the determinants of the observed dynamics, using a novel panel...

This paper provides the first empirical examination of the microstructure of the euro money market, using tick data from brokers located in 6 countries. Special emphasis is put on the institutional environment (monetary policy decisions and their implementation, payment systems and private...