European Central Bank

Consumers' payment preferences and banking digitalisation in the euro area

03/12/2024 European Central Bank Central banks

This paper contributes to understanding consumers' retail payment preferences and digitalisation in personal finances. We focus on the acceptance of cashless payments in everyday situations and the use of mobile banking apps in the euro area, where the payment services market has changed significantly in recent years. In particular, we study app-based tools for day-to-day (offline) purchases that involve small amounts of money as well as digital tools for managing personal finances.

Tell me something I don’t already know: learning in low and high-inflation settings

03/11/2024 European Central Bank Central banks

Using randomized control trials (RCTs) applied over time in different countries, we study whether the economic environment affects how agents learn from new information. We show that as inflation rose in advanced economies, both households and firms became more attentive and informed about publicly available news about inflation, leading them to respond less to exogenously provided information about inflation and monetary policy.

Public guarantees, private banks’ incentives, and corporate outcomes: evidence from the COVID-19 crisis

03/08/2024 European Central Bank Central banks

We show that public guaranteed loans (PGL) increase credit availability improving real effects, but private banks’ incentives imply that weaker banks shift riskier corporate loans to taxpayers. We exploit credit register data during the COVID-19 shock in Spain, and a stylized model guides the empirics. Unlike non-PGL, banks provide more PGL to riskier firms in which banks have higher pre-crisis shares of firm total credit. Importantly, these effects are stronger for weaker banks.

The nonlinear effects of banks’ vulnerability to capital depletion in euro area countries

02/21/2024 European Central Bank Central banks

When capital in the banking system becomes depleted, the degree to which financial intermediation and the macroeconomy are adversely affected is likely to depend on the financial and macroeconomic environment. However, existing studies either assume that the effects of bank capital shocks are linear or ignore feedback effects and the impact on the macroeconomy. Using data on the largest euro area countries and Bayesian Panel Threshold VARs, we investigate the importance of different factors in amplifying shocks in banks’ vulnerability to capital depletion.

Aggregate uncertainty, HANK, and the ZLB

02/21/2024 European Central Bank Central banks

We propose a novel methodology for solving Heterogeneous Agents New Keynesian (HANK) models with aggregate uncertainty and the Zero Lower Bound (ZLB) on nominal interest rates. Our efficient solution strategy combines the sequence-state Jacobian methodology in Auclert et al. (2021) with a tractable structure for aggregate uncertainty by means of a two-regimes shock structure.

The unequal impact of the 2021-22 inflation surge on euro area households

02/20/2024 European Central Bank Central banks

The 2021-22 surprise inflation surge had a major impact on households in the euro area. It reduced the real incomes and net wealth of most households as there was no immediate increase in nominal wages and pensions, nominal house prices and the nominal value of bonds, deposits, cash and debt following the rise in the price level. This influenced households’ present and future consumption and therefore their welfare.

The unequal impact of the 2021-22 inflation surge on euro area households

02/20/2024 European Central Bank Central banks

Climate transition risk in the banking sector: what can prudential regulation do?

02/16/2024 European Central Bank Central banks

Climate-related risks are due to increase in coming years and can pose serious threats to financial stability. This paper, by means of a DSGE model including heterogeneous firms and banks, financial frictions and prudential regulation, first shows the need of climate-related capital requirements in the existing prudential framework. Indeed, we find that without specific climate prudential policies, transition risk can generate excessive risk-taking by banks, which in turn increases the volatility of lending and output.

Mortgage borrowing limits and house prices: evidence from a policy change in Ireland

02/15/2024 European Central Bank Central banks

This paper studies how mortgage borrowers and house prices react to a tightening of mortgage limits following a policy change in Ireland in 2015. The policy introduced limits to the loan-to-income and loan-to-value ratios of new mortgages issued. In response to a tightening borrowing constraint, borrowers can choose to purchase a cheaper house or to reduce the leverage (LTV) of the mortgage.

Measuring market-based core inflation expectations

02/14/2024 European Central Bank Central banks

We build a novel term structure model for pricing synthetic euro area core inflation-linked swaps, a hypothetical swap contract indexed to core inflation. Our approach relies on a term structure model of traded headline inflation-linked swap rates, which we assume span core inflation. The model provides estimates of market-based expectations for core inflation, as well as core inflation risk premia, at daily frequency, whereas core inflation expectations from surveys or macroeconomic projections are typically only available monthly or quarterly.

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