Global structural factors both monetary and real played a prominent role in the burst of the subprime crisis: 1) the so-called Bretton Woods II international monetary system; 2) the reduction of US real investment return compared with competing countries. We develop a two-country partial...

We examine the impact of the ECB’s Securities Market Program (SMP) and the ECB’s two Covered Bond Purchase Programs (CBPPs) on sovereign bond spreads and covered-bond prices, respectively, for five euro-area stressed countries -- Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Our data are...

During recent years, central banks have increased the levels of their international reserves at an unprecedented pace. In this paper, we introduce new country-specific reserve data and examine determinants of the composition of international reserves. Using a dataset of 36 countries (and the...

Financial intermediaries issue the majority of liquid securities, and nonfinancial firms have become net savers, holding intermediaries' debt as cash. This paper shows that intermediaries' liquidity creation stimulates growth -- firms hold their debt for unhedgeable investment needs -- but also...

This paper uses a natural experiment to study the impact of a loan supply shock on a Hungarian matched bank-firm dataset. The event studied is a funding shock Hungarian banks faced following the collapse of the Lehman Brothers. Banks were affected via their external funding and positions on the...

Monetary policy transmission may be impaired if banks rebalance their portfolios towards securities. We identify the bank lending and risk-taking channels of monetary policy by exploiting – Italian's unique – credit and security registers. In crisis times, with higher ECB liquidity, less...