The global finance crisis prompted central banks in many countries to cut short-term policy rates to near zero levels. Yet, lending rates did not fall as much as the decline in policy rates would have suggested. We argue that comparing lending rates to policy rates is misleading: banks do not...

The experience of a number of central banks in emerging economies indicates that capital flows can pose a dilemma. For example, raising policy rates can attract more capital inflows by raising deposit rates. It has been suggested, however, that raising reserve requirements instead of the policy...

This paper studies a modern monetary economy: trade in both goods and securities relies on money provided by intermediaries. While money is valued for its liquidity, its creation requires costly leverage. Inflation, security prices and the transmission of monetary policy then depend on the...

This paper examines whether euro area unconventional monetary policies have affected the loss-absorbing buffers (that is the resilience) of the banking industry. We employ various measures to capture the effect of the broad array of programmes used by the ECB to implement balance sheet policies,...

We review extant work on the transmission of monetary policy, both conventional and unconventional, of the major advanced economies to East Asia through monetary policy reactions, integrated bond markets and induced currency appreciation. We present new results on the growth of foreign currency...

The global financial crisis led to discussion of corrective bank taxes to promote financial stability. This paper interprets the widening of the FDIC assessment base from deposits to assets less equity for US-chartered banks in April 2011 as such a corrective or Pigovian tax. In terms of yields,...

This paper investigates how monetary policy affects bank profitability. We use data for 109 large international banks headquartered in 14 major advanced economies for the period 1995-2012. Overall, we find a positive relationship between the level of short-term rates and the slope of the yield...

This paper investigates how the prolonged period of low interest rates affects bank intermediation activity. We use data for 113 large international banks headquartered in 14 major advanced economies during the period 1994-2015. We find that low interest rates induce banks to shift their...

This paper investigates the overall effect of the European Central Bank's (ECB's) unconventional monetary policies (UMPs) implemented since 2008 on euro area bank retail lending and deposit rates offered to households and non-financial corporations. To do so, we use an analytical approach that...

This paper explores the impact of low (but) positive and negative market interest rates on euro area banks' net interest margin (NIM) and its components, retail lending and retail deposit rates. Using two proprietary bank-level data sets, I find a positive impact of the level of the short-term...