Low interest rates are becoming a threat to the stability of the life insurance industry, especially in countries such as Germany, where products with relatively high guaranteed returns sold in the past still represent a prominent share of the total portfolio. This contribution aims to assess...

Banks and other financial institutions which were too-big-to-fail (TBTF) played a central role during the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009. The present article lays out how misguided policies enabled banks to grow both in size as well as in complexity and therefore acquire TBTF status,...

Central bank intervention in the form of quantitative easing (QE) during times of low interest rates is a controversial topic. This paper introduces a novel approach to study the effectiveness of such unconventional measures. Using U.S. data on six key financial and macroeconomic variables...

Modern central banks increasingly value monetary policy transparency, and attempt to build credibility by communicating their decisions to the public. This paper studies whether the communication of central banks can be used to explain upcoming changes in their most important monetary policy...

In this paper, we develop a gap model based on a reduced form of the New Keynesian Model. The model offers various scenario structure tools which analyze the dynamics of key macro economic variables under diverse shocks and depicts their properties and historical decompositions. This framework...

This paper investigates the link between bank-firm lending relationships and monetary policy pass-through, focusing on episodes of low interest rates. Using administrative tax and bank supervisory data ranging from 1997 to 2019, we track the entirety of bank-firm relationships in Norway. Our...

We investigate global factors associated with bank capital flows. We formulate a model of the international banking system where global banks interact with local banks. The solution highlights the bank leverage cycle as the determinant of the transmission of financial conditions across borders...