Virtual currencies are a contemporary form of private money. Thanks to their technological properties, their global transaction networks are relatively safe, transparent, and fast. This gives them good prospects for further development. However, they remain unlikely to challenge the dominant...

The European Central Bank's asset purchase programs, while intended to stabilize the economy, may have unintended side effects on financial stability. This paper aims at gauging the effects on financial markets, the banking sector, and lending to non-financial firms. Using a structural vector...

On 16th November 2009, SUERF, CEPS and the Belgian Financial Forum coorganized a conference "Crisis management at cross-roads" in Brussels. All papers in the present volume are based on contributions at the conference and the SUERF Annual Lecture which followed the event.

The European Central Bank (ECB) took many measures to combat the eurozone's rolling financial crisis. For providing desperately scarce dollars to eurozone banks, the ECB relied on the U.S. Federal Reserve. Using a novel econometric framework, we identify financial markets' response to the...

Central bank announcements move financial markets. The response of inflation and growth expectations, on the other hand, is often small or even counterintuitive. Based on tick-by-tick futures prices on bonds and stock prices, I confirm these seemingly puzzling results for the euro area and...

Central bank announcements have strong effects on interest rates, but small or even counterintuitive effects on economic expectations. Based on tick-by-tick futures prices on bonds and stock prices, I confirm these seemingly puzzling results for the euro area and provide evidence that they are...

Most alternative blueprints for European Monetruy Union (EMU) differ in their opinions about convergence requirements or the need for binding fiscal rules and controls of individual national governments' debt policies, but there is, if not complete consensus, widespread agreement that the...

Central banks actively engage in sterilized foreign exchange market intervention despite numerous empirical studies indicating that these operations do not systematically affect the exchange rate. Are these policies misguided and central bankers irrational? Or is evidence showing the...

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...

We employ two-stage empirical strategy to analyze the impact of macroeconomic news and central bank communication on the exchange rates of three Central and Eastern European (CEE) currencies against the euro. First we estimate the nominal equilibrium exchange rate based on a monetary model....