For central banks, the monitoring of financing conditions plays a pivotal role in assessing the actual transmission of monetary policy impulses to borrowers. This paper presents in detail some of the indicators and data used by the ECB to assess financing conditions in the euro area. It also...

A striking development in the euro area financial markets since 1999 was the rapid growth of the corporate debt securities market. This paper offers a first empirical examination of this market since the introduction of the euro using macroeconomic data. It is shown that corporate debt issuance...

This paper presents an error-correction model of the interest rate pass-through process based on a marginal cost pricing framework including switching and asymmetric information costs. Estimation results for the euro area suggest that the proportion of the pass-through of changes in market...

This paper tests financial contagion due to interbank linkages. For identification we exploit an idiosyncratic, sudden shock caused by a large-bank failure in conjunction with detailed data on interbank exposures. First, we find robust evidence that higher interbank exposure to the failed bank...

We identify the effects of monetary policy on credit risk-taking with an exhaustive credit register of loan applications and contracts. We separate the changes in the composition of the supply of credit from the concurrent changes in the volume of supply and quality and volume of demand. We...

We identify the impact of short-term interest rates on credit risk-taking by analyzing a comprehensive credit register from Spain, a country where for the last twenty years monetary policy was mostly decided abroad. Discrete choice, within borrower comparison and duration analyses show that...

This occasional paper explains why the bank lending survey was developed by the ECB and describes its main features. It discusses the importance of credit developments for both the economy and the functioning of monetary policy, and further clarifies why the survey was introduced. Furthermore,...

This paper provides new evidence on the dynamics of equity risk premia in euro area stock markets across country and industry portfolios. We develop and estimate a conditional intertemporal CAPM where returns on aggregate euro area, country and industry portfolios depend on the market risk as...

We examine the link between equity risk premiums and demographic changes using a very long sample over most of the twentieth century for the US, Japan, UK, Germany and France, and a shorter sample from 1970-1998 for fifteen countries. We find that demographic variables do predict excess returns...

Four years after the introduction of the euro, this paper provides an overview of the current structure and integration of the euro area financial systems and related policy initiatives. We first compare the euro area financial structure with that of the United States and Japan. Using new and...