Empirical studies of the "shoe-leather" costs of inflation are typically computed using M1 as a measure of money. Yet, official data on M1 includes all currency issued, regardless of the country of residence of the holder. Using monetary data adjusted for U.S. dollars abroad, we show that the...

I analyze the risk premium on bank bonds at origination with special focus on the role of implicit and explicit public guarantees and the systemic relevance of issuing institutions. Looking at the asset swap spread on 5,500 bonds, I find that explicit guarantees and sovereign creditworthiness...

We provide an assessment of the determinants of the risk premium paid by non-financial corporations on long-term bonds. By looking at 5,500 issues in the period 2005-2012, we find that the turbulence in the sovereign debt market has been a major driver of corporate risk in recent years. Compared...

We assess the long-term funding conditions for banks in the US, the euro area and the UK and, separately, for the group of global systemically important financial institutions (G-SIFIs), over the period 1997-2011. After the outbreak of the subprime crisis there was a considerable reshuffling of...

We develop a methodology to identify and rank ‘systemically important financial institutions’ (SIFIs). Our approach is consistent with that followed by the Financial Stability Board but, unlike the latter, it is free of judgment and it is based entirely on publicly available data, thus...

In this paper we present an overview of theoretical and empirical contributions exploring the inter-linkages between financial factors and real economic activity. We first revisit the main theoretical approaches that allow financial frictions to be embedded into general equilibrium models, and...