Motivated by the linkage between credit and growth in the Greek economy, and the deceleration of credit since the financial crisis, this paper studies the evolution of credit demand and supply in Greece. A disequilibrium model of demand and supply is estimated spanning the period 2003M1-2011M3....

We study the application of approximate mean field variational inference algorithms to Bayesian panel VAR models in which an exchangeable prior is placed on the dynamic parameters and the residuals follow either a Gaussian or a Student-t distribution. This reduces the estimation time of possibly...

We derive restrictions for Granger noncausality in Markov-switching vector autoregressive models and also show under which conditions a variable does not affect the forecast of the hidden Markov process. Based on Bayesian approach to evaluating the hypotheses, the computational tools for...

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...

The paper considers a Bayesian approach to the cointegrated VAR model with a uniform prior on the cointegration space. Building on earlier work by Villani (2005b), where the posterior probability of the cointegration rank can be calculated conditional on the lag order, the current paper also...

In this paper we review the methodology of forecasting with log-linearised DSGE models using Bayesian methods. We focus on the estimation of their predictive distributions, with special attention being paid to the mean and the covariance matrix of h-step ahead forecasts. In the empirical...