We study public funding of banks and non-financial firms in a time of crisis. We find that bank capitalization is more effective in stabilizing the economy than direct funding to firms, but it also creates larger distortions. We show that the optimal, social-welfare-maximizing, structure of a...

We measure the tone (sentiment) of the ECB's Governing Council regarding economic outlook at the time of each monetary policy meeting and use this information together with the Eurosystem/ECB staff macroeconomic projections to directly estimate the Governing Council's loss function. Our results...