European Central Bank

Non-homothetic housing demand and geographic worker sorting

02/06/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

Housing expenditure shares decline with income. A household’s income determines its sensitivity to housing costs and drives its location decision. Has spatial skill sorting increased because low income individuals are avoiding increasingly expensive regions? I augment a standard quantitative spatial model with flexible non-homothetic preferences to estimate the effect of the national increase in the relative supply of high skilled workers that has put upward pressure on housing costs in skill-intensive cities.

The implications of CIP deviations for international capital flows

02/03/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

We study the implications of deviations from covered interest rate parity for international capital flows using novel data covering euro-area derivatives and securities holdings. Consistent with a dynamic model of currency risk hedging, we document that investors’ holdings of USD bonds decrease following a widening in the USD-EUR cross-currency basis (CCB). This effect is driven by investors with larger FX rollover risk and hedging mandates, and it is robust to instrumenting the CCB. These shifts in bond demand significantly affect bond prices.

Leverage actually: the impact on banks’ borrowing costs in euro area money markets

02/03/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

This paper explores the impact of the regulatory leverage ratio (LR) on banks’ demand for reserves and thus the pricing of overnight liquidity in the euro area money markets. We use daily transaction-level money market data during the period between January 2017 - February 2023 and examine the two major overnight money market segments – the unsecured and the secured one, distinguishing between over-the-counter (OTC) and CCP-cleared trades for the latter. We find a significant positive link between a bank’s LR and the spread between its money market borrowing rate and the DFR.

The great supply shock and the euro area, viewed through a suite of supply indices

01/31/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

This paper examines the great supply shock following the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine, using a novel suite of supply indices. The suite has indices for the euro area total economy, euro area industries, sectors and countries. The suite also computes the contributions to the indices from supply drivers at origin, in transport, or at destination. The results from the suite show that the supply shock has had wide-spread effects, and that their dynamics have been industry-, sector- and country-specific.

How tightening mortgage credit raises rents and increases inequality in the housing market

01/16/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

Housing affordability is at the centre of the political debate in many euro area countries. With steadily increasing rents and house prices still high relative to historical standards, many young households, particularly in large cities, are devoting an ever larger share of their income to housing expenses, and are finding it increasingly hard to access their desired size and quality of housing.

Flexible asset purchases and repo market functioning

01/15/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

Flexibility has progressively become a distinctive feature of the implementation of the Eurosystem’s asset purchases. In its many manifestations, flexibility has also been used by asset managers in the daily selection of sovereign bonds to limit the impact of asset purchases on repo market specialness. This study shows that, since the inception of the Public Sector Purchase Programme, flexible purchases of bonds greatly mitigated the Eurosystem’s footprint on the repo market.

Time-varying risk aversion and inflation-consumption correlation in an equilibrium term structure model

01/13/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

Inflation risk premiums tend to be positive in an economy mainly hit by supply shocks, and negative if demand shocks dominate. Risk premiums also fluctuate with risk aversion. We shed light on this nexus in a linear-quadratic equilibrium microfinance model featuring time variation in inflation-consumption correlation and risk aversion. We obtain analytical solutions for real and nominal yield curves and for risk premiums. While changes in the inflation-consumption correlation drive nominal yields, changes in risk aversion drive real yields and act as amplifier on nominal yields.

Climate-linked bonds

01/09/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

Climate-linked bonds, issued by governments and supranational organizations, are pivotal in advancing towards a net-zero economy. These bonds adjust their payoffs based on climate variables such as average temperature and greenhouse gas emissions, providing investors a hedge against long-term climate risks. They also signal government commitment to climate action and incentivize stronger policies. The price differential between climate-linked bonds and nominal bonds reflects market expectations of climate risks.

Why gradual and predictable? Bank lending during the sharpest quantitative tightening ever

01/09/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

Exploiting the recalibration of ECB’s outstanding central bank funding in 2022, we show that a sharp reabsorption of bank liquidity induces a tightening impact on credit supply, as intended when centralbanks reduce their balance sheets. The tightening originates from the sudden relative convenience for banks accustomed to large liquidity holdings to more rapidly adapt to the new environment. Moreover, we show that the associated reduction in credit supply has real economic effects.

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