Blog Post
Before it is decided who will chair the governing council for the next eight years, the authors look back and examine precisely how decisions have been taken since the ECB was created – by unanimity, by majority, or by consensus.
Working Paper
The author proposes a tilting approach to steer the allocation of the Eurosystem’s assets and collateral towards low-carbon sectors, which would reduce the cost of capital for these sectors relative to high-carbon sectors. Central banks have already started to look at climate-related risks in the context of financial stability. Should they also take the carbon intensity of assets into account in the context of monetary policy?
Blog Post
Since the European Central Bank’s announcement of its quantitative easing (QE) programme in January 2015, national central banks have been buying government and national agency bonds. In this post the authors look at the effect of QE on sectoral holdings of government bonds, updating the calculations published initially in May 2016.
Policy Contribution
In this Policy Contribution prepared for the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) as an input to the Monetary Dialogue, the authors clarify what excess liquidity is and argue that it is not a good indicator of whether banks’ have more incentives in risk-taking and look at indicators that might signal that bank lending in the euro area creates undue risks.
Policy Contribution
The authors investigate the ECB’s profit-making activity of the last 20 years, assessing how this was achieved and the reasons why we should care more broadly about central banks generating profits.
Blog Post
The European Commission’s proposal for a new stabilisation instrument inside the EU budget for the countries of the economic and monetary union is disappointing. This analysis highlights the proposed instrument’s main limitations, as well as the restrictive factors that will persist without a deeper EU budget reform.
Blog Post
The stock of liquidity supplied through the ECB’s open market operations has remained relatively stable, though there is a clearer change in the country composition.
Policy Brief
Two diametrically opposed visions of the euro-area architecture have been put forward. Departing from both Juncker’s and Schäuble’s proposals, the author identifies new ideas to develop the euro-area governance
Blog Post
The Eurosystem gets a lot of attention from academics and the media, but they largely focus on its statutory objective of maintaining price stability. There is much less interest in its transparency and operational efficiency. We analyse these issues, and find that the Eurosystem is less transparent and operates with significantly higher costs and headcount than the US Federal Reserve System.
External Publication
This paper assesses the decentralised implementation of monetary policy by the Eurosystem in terms of its transparency, efficiency and simplicity. Compared to the Fed, the Eurosystem seems to have higher staff numbers and operational costs for similar tasks.
