On 6 September 2012 the Governing Council of the ECB decided on the technical details of new sovereign bond purchasing operations, called the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMTs). The notes in this compilation evaluate the framework of the OMTs and discuss various aspects of the interventions...

This paper studies the effects of ECB communications about unconventional monetary policy operations on the perceived sovereign risk of Italy over the last five years. More than fifty events concerning non-standard operations are identified and classified with respect to the specific ECB...

In this paper, we use detailed data on the sovereign debt holdings of all German banks to analyse the determinants of sovereign debt exposures and the implications of sovereign exposures for bank risk. Our main findings are as follows. First, sovereign bond holdings are heterogeneous across...