This paper analyzes the risk-taking behavior of open-end corporate bond funds after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the policy interventions that followed it. Using monthly security-level information on portfolio holdings at the global level in 2020, we show that funds more exposed to...

This paper provides evidence that, by restoring market functioning, central banks' pandemic-related asset purchase programmes lowered payoff complementarities among investors in corporate bond funds, reinforcing asset managers' willingness to hold riskier assets to increase funds' returns....

This paper shows that higher information technology (IT) adoption by banks led to a larger increase in corporate lending in the months following the COVID-19 outbreak in Italy. Examining banks with heterogeneous degrees of IT adoption, we investigate the dynamics of credit and its allocation...

Policy evaluation based on the estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with aggregate macroeconomic time series rests on the assumption that a representative agent can be identified, whose behavioural parameters are independent of the policy rules. Building on earlier work by...