Financial institutions

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.

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.

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.

The “doom loop” and default incentives

12/16/2024 European Central Bank Central banks

The “doom loop” or “sovereign-bank nexus” has been a key factor in the European debt crisis, driven by feedback between fiscal sustainability risks and financial stability. This Research Bulletin revisits the doom loop, examining strategic default incentives and the unintended effects of policy interventions. While limiting banks’ exposure to sovereign debt can break the doom loop, it may increase default risks by weakening governments’ repayment incentives.

The macroeconomic effects of liquidity supply during financial crises

11/28/2024 European Central Bank Central banks

Negative economic shocks can cause waves of investor pessimism about the resilience of banks, which, in turn, generate additional adverse macroeconomic effects. This is commonly cited as an explanation for the economic havoc wrought by the global financial crisis of 2007-08. We introduce the notion of pessimism in a real business cycle model, which is a standard framework for business cycle analysis. The possibility of waves of pessimism generates countercyclical demand from banks for liquid assets (e.g., bank reserves).

Banks lose – someone gains: Households’ unequal exposure to financial distress

10/30/2024 European Central Bank Central banks

Is the burden of distress in the banking sector shared equally among households, or is it distributed unevenly? Following the global financial crisis, the economic consequences of severe disruptions to the banking sector and the unequal impact of recessions have become a key concern of macroeconomic policy. This article examines how temporary banking sector losses affect households differently according to their income levels. The analysis reveals that low-income households bear most of the burden, while high-income households tend to be less adversely affected.

Heterogeneous effects of monetary tightening in response to energy price shocks

10/23/2024 European Central Bank Central banks

This article analyses how monetary policy shapes the aggregate and distributional effects of an energy price shock. Based on the observed heterogeneity in consumption exposures to energy and household wealth, we build a quantitative small open-economy Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian (HANK) model that matches salient features of the euro area data. The model incorporates energy as both a consumption good for households with non-homothetic preferences as well as a factor input into production with input complementarities.

Consumer demand for central bank digital currency as a means of payment

09/18/2024 European Central Bank Central banks

What factors could drive transactional demand for central bank digital currency (CBDC)? We analyse payment survey data to arrive at a framework for understanding the role of adoption frictions and design strategies in shaping CBDC demand. The results of our analysis show that, while consumers may initially prefer to use more traditional payment methods, a design tailored to their specific needs could significantly increase CBDC uptake. Raising awareness and capitalising on network effects could also boost demand for CBDC.

A diverse investor base impacts the effectiveness of large-scale asset purchases

06/27/2024 European Central Bank Central banks

Large-scale asset purchases can impact the price of securities either directly, when securities are targeted by the central bank, or indirectly through portfolio rebalancing by private investors. We quantify both the direct impact and that of portfolio rebalancing, emphasising the role of investor heterogeneity. We use proprietary security-level data on asset holdings of different investors. We measure the direct impact at security level, finding that it is smaller for securities predominantly held by more price-elastic investors, i.e. funds and banks.

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