This paper investigates the relationship between short-term interest rates and bank risk. Using a unique database that includes quarterly balance sheet information for listed banks operating in the European Union and the United States in the last decade, we find evidence that unusually low...

Central banks of major advanced economies have maintained a very accommodative monetary policy stance in the last few years. However, concerns have surfaced that the transmission of low policy rates to lending rates has been weaker than in the past. Has the transmission of policy rates to...

Accommodative monetary policy during the financial crisis was instrumental in preventing a deeper recession. Views differ, however, on how long such measures should be kept in place. At the heart of this debate is the notion that a protracted period of policy accommodation could create...

We study how relationship lending and transaction lending vary over the business cycle. We develop a model in which relationship banks gather information on their borrowers, which allows them to provide loans for profitable firms during a crisis. Due to the services they provide, operating costs...

The global financial crisis has reaffirmed the importance of financial factors for macroeconomic fluctuations. Recent work has shown how the conventional pre-crisis prescription that monetary policy should pay no attention to financial variables over and above their effects on inflation may no...

This paper analyses how the Basel III leverage ratio (Tier 1 capital/exposure) behaves over the cycle. The analysis proposes a setup to test for the cyclical properties of bank capital ratios, taking into account structural shifts in banks' behaviour during the global financial crisis and its...

A large body of literature has shown that small firms experience difficulties in accessing the credit market due to informational asymmetries. Banks can overcome these asymmetries through relationship lending, or at least mitigate their effects by asking for collateral. Small firms, especially...

This paper provides some general lessons for the design of countercyclical capital buffers. Its main empirical contribution is to analyse conditioning variables which could guide the build-up and release of capital. A major distinction for countercyclical capital schemes is whether conditioning...

We explore the concept of global liquidity based on a factor model estimated using a large set of financial and macroeconomic variables from 24 advanced and emerging market economies. We measure global liquidity conditions based on the common global factors in the dynamics of liquidity...

This paper assesses the macroeconomic effects of unconventional monetary policies by estimating a panel VAR with monthly data from eight advanced economies over a sample spanning the period since the onset of the global finanancial crisis. It finds that an exogenous increase in central bank...