Many countries imposed tighter bank capital requirements following the 2008-09 financial crisis in order to repair the structural flaws in the banking system exposed during the crisis and thereby safeguard financial stability. A new study for the United States explores the macroeconomic effects of a tightening of bank capital requirements.

German sovereign bonds have become scarce on the European repo market over recent years. A new analysis investigates the impact of the Eurosystem’s monetary policy asset purchase programme on the repo market, and shows that central bank securities lending can help to counteract scarcity.

In the low-interest-rate setting, the Eurosystem’s accommodative monetary policy has been relying to a greater extent on non-standard measures and forward guidance on the future path of policy rates. A new paper examines how these measures have worked across the term structure and how market expectations have evolved during the phase of low interest rates. The results illustrate that the Eurosystem can continue to influence market participants’ interest rate expectations at the effective lower bound by way of unconventional monetary policy measures.

German credit institutions are sufficiently capitalised to deal with potential losses from their residential mortgage exposures that could arise if house prices, which have been rising strongly since 2010, were to fall sharply. This is shown by the results of two current stress tests that have been developed by Bundesbank experts for risk analyses.

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Those familiar words are no less true in the world of economic forecasting. A new study considers how far into the future it makes sense to forecast.

How much capital is needed both at the individual bank level and for the system as a whole especially in situations of macroeconomic stress? And is the capital in the system distributed across individual banks in the optimal way to cover potential systemic losses? A new study gives answers to these questions in an integrated supervisory framework.

True to the maxim that a euro can only ever be spent once, it is often thought that foreign direct investment by German firms means that those firms reduce their investment in Germany. A new study examines this hypothesis, exploring the relationship between domestic and foreign investment.

Does a less expansionary monetary policy, for example, an increase in interest rates, lead to lower inflation and dampened inflation expectations? Many empirical and theoretical studies suggest that it does. A new study, however, shows that, if inflation expectations diverge widely, a less expansionary monetary policy can lead to increased inflation and higher inflation expectations.

The productivity of many firms evolves over time. This impacts on the optimal inflation rate – the rate of price increase with the least distortionary effect on relative goods prices. Our estimates for the United States suggest that, due to firm-level productivity changes, the optimal inflation rate has dropped from somewhat over 2% in the mid-1980s to a current level of roughly 1%.

The Eurosystem’s monetary policy is geared towards macroeconomic developments over the entire euro area. Does it produce different effects in the individual member states? And, if yes, how big are the differences? Our empirical study on interest rate policy examines this question for Germany, France, Italy and Spain, the four largest economies in the euro area.