European Central Bank

Putting countries on the cap? Pastoral visits of John Paul II and international trade

03/13/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

During his reign from 1979 to 2005, Pope John Paul II visited 129 countries, more than the 263 Popes before him combined. I document a significant increase in exports to trading partners with a relatively high share of Catholics following a Pastoral visit, leading to a non-negligible increase in aggregate exports. The biggest beneficiaries in terms of increased trade are visited countries that are at lower stages of economic development and have relatively few Catholics and weak trade links.

Consumer attitudes towards a central bank digital currency

03/12/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

We field a series of experiments in a population-representative survey of European consumers to examine their attitudes towards the possible introduction of a digital euro. First, we show that a short video explaining the key features of the digital euro is effective in changing consumers’ beliefs about such a new form of payment and increases the likelihood of adoption by 12pp relative to a control group that is not shown the video.

From flood to fire: is physical climate risk taken into account in banks’ residential mortgage rates?

03/12/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

Physical climate risks can have a large regional impact, which can influence mortgage loans’ credit risk and should be priced by the lenders. Motivated by the relevance of climate change for financial intermediaries, our paper aims at analysing if physical climate risks are being reflected in residential real estate loan rates of banks. We show that on average banks seem to demand a physical climate risk premium from mortgage borrowers and the premium has increased over recent years. However, there is significant heterogeneity in bank practices.

The heterogeneous effects of household debt relief

02/26/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

Large-scale debt forbearance is a key policy tool during crises, yet targeting is challenging due to information asymmetries. Using transaction-level data from a Portuguese bank during COVID-19, we find that financially fragile households are more likely to enter forbearance, irrespective of income shocks. Mortgage payment suspension increases consumption and savings, but effects differ across households. Low liquid wealth and income are associated with a higher marginal propensity to consume.

Critical input disruptions – mapping out the road to EU resilience

02/24/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

We study how disruptions to the supply of foreign critical inputs (FCIs) might affect value added at different levels of aggregation. FCIs are inputs primarily sourced from extra-EU countries with highly concentrated supply, or consisting in advanced technology products, or which are key to the green transition. Using firm-level customs and balance sheet data for Belgium, Spain, France, Italy and Slovenia, our framework allows us to assess how much – and how differently – geoeconomic fragmentation might affect European economies.

Firm ownership and the macroeconomics of incentive leakages

02/20/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

Questions about market power have become salient in macroeconomics. We consider the role of institutional structures in addressing these within a dynamic general equilibrium framework. Standard models account for monopoly profits as a lump-sum transfer to the representative agent. We label this an "incentive leakage," and show this to be a general characteristic of firm-optimal arrangements. We show that shareholder-operated or worker-operated firms that eliminate leakage can generate within-firm incentives that effectively reduce monopoly distortion in equilibrium.

Fiscal and macroprudential policies during an energy crisis

02/19/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

We construct a New-Keynesian E-DSGE model with energy disaggregation and financial intermediaries to show how energy-related fiscal and macroprudential policies interact in affecting the euro area macroeconomy and carbon emissions. When a shock to the price of fossil resources propagates through the energy and banking sector, it leads to a surge in inflation while lowering output and carbon emissions, absent policy interventions.

Bank transparency and market efficiency

02/18/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

This paper explores the impact of bank transparency on market efficiency by comparing banks that disclose supervisory capital requirements to those that remain opaque. Due to the informational content of supervisory capital requirements for the market this opacity might hinder market efficiency. The paper estimates an average 11.5% reduction in funding costs for transparent versus opaque banks. However, there is some heterogeneity in those effects. Transparency helps the market to sort across safer and riskier banks.

Green and brown returns in a production economy

02/18/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

Does it pay to invest in green companies? In countries where a market for carbon is functioning, such as those within the European Union, our findings suggest that it should be beneficial. Using a sample of green and brown European firms, we initially demonstrate that green companies have outperformed brown ones in recent times. Subsequently, we develop a production economy model in which brown firms acquire permits to emit carbon into the atmosphere. We find that the presence of a well-functioning carbon market could account for the green equity premium observed in our data.

Investment funds and euro disaster risk

02/16/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

We document that compared to all other investor groups investment funds exhibit a distinctly procyclical behavior when financial-market beliefs about the probability of a euro-related, institutional rare disaster spike. In response to such euro disaster risk shocks, investment funds shed periphery but do not adjust core sovereign debt holdings. The periphery debt shed by investment funds is picked up by investors domiciled in the issuing country, namely banks in the short term and insurance corporations and households in the medium term.

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