Using security-level holdings for all euro-area investors, we study portfolio rebalancing during the quantitative easing program from March 2015 to December 2017. Foreign investors outside the euro area accommodated most of the Eurosystem's pur- chases. Duration, government credit, and corporate...

We incorporate external information extracted from the European Central Bank's Survey of Professional Forecasters into the predictions of a Bayesian VAR, using entropic tilting and soft conditioning. The resulting conditional forecasts significantly improve the plain BVAR point and density...

With the European debt crisis, the role of assets accepted by the Eurosystem as collateral for refinancing operations took on a new place in the public debate, as, against a backdrop of shifting demand for refinancing, movements in European bond prices led to significant fluctuations in the...

In this paper, we study the fit and the predictive performance of the Phillips curve for euro area inflation with regard to different inflation series, time periods and predictor variables, notably different global factors. We compare the relative performance of a large set of alternative global...

This paper studies the divergence/convergence process of European countries as regard the financing behavior of small and medium sized enterprises. Using a firm level and country representative survey, we construct country-time indicators of SMEs' use of three external financing sources: bank...

We measure the relative role of sovereign-dependence risk and balance sheet (credit) risk in euro area interbank market fragmentation from 2011 to 2015. We combine bank-to-bank loan data with detailed supervisory information on banks' cross-border and cross-sector exposures. We study the impact...

In the mid-1990s the euro area experienced a change in macroeconomic volatility. Around the same time, at business cycle frequencies the correlation between inflation and money growth changed markedly, turning from positive to negative. Distinguishing the periods pre- and post-1994, we estimate...

We assess the effect of accepting illiquid assets as collateral at the central bank on banks' lending activity. We study the lending activity of the 177 largest banks in the Euro area between 2011m1 and 2014m12 and the composition of their pool of collateral pledged with the Eurosystem. Panel...

We use new daily security-level data and test the impact of the Eurosystem's Public sector purchase program (PSPP) on bond returns in the French bond market. We investigate three possible types of supply shocks: related to the cumulative past purchases (“stock”) since the start of the...

We use several U.S. and euro-area surveys of professional forecasters to estimate a dynamic factor model of inflation with time-varying uncertainty. We obtain survey-consistent distributions of future inflation at any horizon, both in the United States and in the euro area. Our methodology...