The ability of monetary policy to influence the term structure of interest rates and the macroeconomy depends on the extent to which financial market participants prefer to hold bonds of different maturities. We microfound such preferred-habitat demand in a fully-specified dynamic stochastic...

Macroprudential policies should strengthen the banking sector throughout the financial cycle. However, while bank credit growth is used to capture cyclical exuberance and calibrate buffer requirements, it depends on potentially heterogeneous dynamics on the borrower and lender sides. By...

Do negative interest rates affect banks' cost efficiency? We exploit the unprecedented introduction of negative policy interest rates in the euro area to investigate whether banks make a virtue out of necessity in reacting to negative interest rates by adjusting their cost efficiency. We find...

In this paper we build a unique dataset to study how banks decide which firms to lend to and how this decision depends on their own situation and the characteristics of their borrowers. We find that weaker capitalised banks adjust their credit standards more than healthier banks, especially for...

The Federal Reserve's (Fed) monetary policy announcements have created massive spillovers to global financial markets. Based on daily data for the sample from 1999 to 2019, this study finds that the Fed's monetary policy announcements created significant international spillovers to bond yields...

We survey the emerging literature on safe assets. The recent evidence on a time-varying safety premium suggests a demand for safety quite distinct from liquidity and classic money demand, offering insight on a strong segmentation between safe savings and speculative investment markets. A related...

This paper reexamines from a theoretical perspective the role of monetary and macroprudential policies in addressing the build-up of risks in the financial system. We construct a stylized general equilibrium model in which the key friction comes from a moral hazard problem in firms' financing...

We study how differences in the aggregate structure of corporate debt financing affect the transmission of monetary policy. Using high-frequency financial market data to identify monetary policy shocks in a panel of euro area countries, we find that: bond finance dampens the overall response of...

We quantify the impact that central bank refinancing o perations a nd f unding f acilities had at reducing the banking sector's intrinsic fragility in the euro area in 2014-2019. We do so by constructing, estimating and calibrating a micro-structural model of imperfect competition in the banking...

Could a monetary policy loosening entail the opposite effect than the intended expansionary impact in a low interest rate environment? We demonstrate that the risk of hitting the rate at which the effect reverses depends on the capitalization of the banking sector by using a non-linear...