This paper studies the role of financial intermediaries in the transmission of central bank corporate bond purchases to bond yields. Contrary to standard expectations, we find that mutual funds—typically viewed as price-elastic investors—amplify, rather than dampen, the effects of these interventions on bond spreads.
When economic analysis requires simultaneous inference across multiple variables and time horizons, this paper shows that conventional pointwise quantiles in Bayesian structural vector autoregressions significantly understate the uncertainty of impulse responses. The performance of recently proposed joint inference methods, which produce noticeably different error band estimates, is evaluated, and calibration routines are suggested to ensure that they achieve the intended nominal probability coverage.
This study evaluates the effectiveness of EU Cohesion Policy as an investment programme, employing a novel dataset that links firm-level data from Orbis with project-level information from the Kohesio database. It focuses on two key questions: (1) Which firms receive EU funding? (2) How does receiving EU funding affect firm performance? By applying a logit model and a local projection difference-in-differences approach, we provide new insights into the allocation mechanisms of EU Cohesion Policy funds and their firm-level impact.
Amid changes in the global macro-financial environment, macroprudential policy within the banking union and beyond has increasingly prioritised the proactive enhancement of resilience. This article argues that this shift towards a more pre-emptive implementation of macroprudential policy has enhanced its complementarity with monetary policy.
The March 2023 banking turmoil has intensified discussions whether social media and the digitalisation of finance have become significant factors in driving severe deposit outflows. We introduce the concept of deposits-at-risk and utilize quantile regressions for disentangling determinants of stressed outflows at the lowest tail of the distribution.
Traditional exposure measures focus on direct exposures to evaluate the losses an institution is exposed to upon the default of a counterparty. Since the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, the importance of indirect exposures via common asset holdings is increasingly recognized. Yet direct and indirect exposures do not to capture the losses that result from shock propagation and amplification following the counterparty's default. In this paper, we introduce the concept of \higher-order exposures" to refer to these spill-over losses and propose a way to formalize and quantify these.
Add full abstract text in one paragraph.This paper examines how the ECB’s 2022–2023 interest-rate hikes affected euro-area banks’ economic net worth and vulnerability to deposit runs. Drawing on granular, confidential data for 139 banks, we estimate each bank’s economic net worth and find that unrealised losses on loans and bonds averaged around 30 per cent of equity. By September 2023, however, roughly half of these losses had been offset by gains from the deposit franchise and interest-rate swaps.
How does environmental, social and governance regulation of banks affect capital provision to the sustainability transition? As ambitious sustainability targets face funding challenges, the financial sector is tasked with channeling more private capital into sustainable investments. However, scaling sustainable technologies often requires investment in non-ESG-compliant assets. The mobility transition to electric vehicles, for example, demands increased supply of battery raw materials like Lithium, Cobalt, Manganese, and Nickel.
Do climate stress tests affect bank credit supply to brown firms? Using a difference-in-differences approach and detailed data on individual bank loans in the euro area, this paper provides novel evidence on the effects of the ECB’s 2022 climate risk stress test. Despite no capital implications or public disclosures, participating banks significantly reduced credit to greenhouse gas-intensive industries relative to nonparticipants. Among affected firms, smaller borrowers were more negatively impacted.
Using a novel worldwide dataset of 5,264 syndicated loans issued to 329 firms from 2006 to 2021, we study how climate-related litigation risk affects firm’s cost of borrowing. We find robust empirical evidence that firms targeted by climate lawsuits pay significantly higher spreads on their bank loans. These effects are more pronounced for firms with weaker environmental performance and higher ESG controversies. The results suggest that lender’s view climate litigation as a material risk factor, which is increasingly priced into debt contracts.
