Financial institutions

The Bank's Court of Directors acts as a unitary board, setting the organisation's strategy and budget and taking key decisions on resourcing and appointments. Required to meet a minimum seven times per year, it has five executive members from the Bank and up to nine non-executive members.

This paper investigates how unrealized losses on banks’ amortized cost securities affect monetary policy transmission to bank lending in the euro area. Leveraging the sharp increase in interest rates between 2022 and 2023 and using granular supervisory data on security holdings and loan-level credit register data, we show that a one percentage point increase in the share of unrealized losses on amortized cost securities amplifies the contractionary effect of monetary tightening on lending supply by approximately one percentage point.

This paper examines the interplay between macroprudential policy, monetary policy and the non-bank financial intermediation (NBFI) sector, drawing on recent research and zooming in particularly on evidence from the euro area2. It documents the growth in the NBFI sector over the past two decades and its particular role in financing the real economy, assesses systemic risks that can emanate from the sector, considers how it interacts with monetary policy, and discusses the implications for macroprudential regulation.

This paper presents the first causal evidence on how banks adjust their voluntary capital buffers (the capital headroom above the required level) in response to changes in capital requirements. Using granular euro area data and exploiting the threshold-based assignment of Other Systemically Important Institution (O-SII) buffers within a regression discontinuity design, we study the liability side of banks’ balance sheets, complementing the asset-focused literature on lending and risk-taking.