Dokument: Asymmetric Effects of Monetary Policy in the Euro Area
| Titel: | Asymmetric Effects of Monetary Policy in the Euro Area | |||||||
| URL für Lesezeichen: | https://docserv.uni-duesseldorf.de/servlets/DocumentServlet?id=59231 | |||||||
| URN (NBN): | urn:nbn:de:hbz:061-20220408-104133-3 | |||||||
| Kollektion: | Dissertationen | |||||||
| Sprache: | Englisch | |||||||
| Dokumententyp: | Wissenschaftliche Abschlussarbeiten » Dissertation | |||||||
| Medientyp: | Text | |||||||
| Autor: | Horst, Maximilian Julius [Autor] | |||||||
| Dateien: |
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| Beitragende: | Prof. Dr. Ulrike Neyer [Gutachter] Prof. Dr. Heinz-Dieter Smeets [Gutachter] | |||||||
| Dewey Dezimal-Klassifikation: | 300 Sozialwissenschaften, Soziologie » 330 Wirtschaft | |||||||
| Beschreibung: | The European Central Bank (ECB) pursues the primary objective of ensuring price stability. According to the ECB's Governing Council, price stability is best maintained by aiming for a symmetric 2% inflation target in the medium term (European Central Bank, 2021a). Considering times of too low inflation rates, the ECB implements conventional expansionary monetary policy by decreasing its short-term monetary policy key interest rates. The intention in doing so is to directly lower commercial banks refinancing costs so that commercial banks pass on their improved refinancing conditions to the real economy resulting in an increase in households' consumption and firms' investment spending and thus in higher credit lending in the economy (European Central Bank, 2002, 2012). Consequently, aggregate demand and thus overall prices in the economy are supposed to increase (traditional interest rate channel of monetary policy).
However, when short-term interest rates have reached the effective lower bound, further interest rate cuts -- and hence also expansionary monetary policy stimuli via the traditional interest rate channel -- are no longer feasible. Then, the ECB introduces unconventional monetary policy instruments to directly reduce longer-term interest rates. In this context, the ECB launched its large-scale asset purchase program, commonly referred to as quantitative easing (QE), in March 2015 to address the risks of a too prolonged period of low, temporarily even negative, inflation rates. When the ECB purchases assets on a large scale, it creates a scarcity of these assets, implying that the respective asset prices increase and yields drop. Long-term interest rates are intended to decrease on a broad scale as a consequence. This should finally trigger economic activity by improving financing conditions for households and firms, and thus increase prices (European Central Bank, 2015). The ECB's large-scale asset purchases are funded by the creation of new reserves (central bank money). Therefore, as a side effect, the amount of excess liquidity in the euro area banking sector has increased continuously since implementation of the QE program began. In March 2020, the ECB decided to expand its large-scale asset purchases in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As a consequence, the amount of excess liquidity in the euro area banking sector has continued to increase, reaching unprecedented levels. Moreover, excess liquidity is distributed heterogeneously across euro area member states. The bulk of this liquidity is held by only a few countries. The overall increase in excess liquidity has been accompanied by a similarly strong and heterogeneous increase in TARGET2 balances. The large quantity of excess liquidity in the euro area banking sector has generated a great amount of concern and debate. However, there has been very little analysis of whether and to what extent large quantities of excess liquidity affect macroeconomic variables (in different countries of a monetary union). Against this background, all three papers of this thesis deal with the consequences of the implementation of the ECB's large-scale asset purchases (QE), especially with large amounts of heterogeneously distributed excess liquidity in the euro area banking sector. | |||||||
| Lizenz: |  Urheberrechtsschutz | |||||||
| Fachbereich / Einrichtung: | Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät » Volkswirtschaftslehre | |||||||
| Dokument erstellt am: | 08.04.2022 | |||||||
| Dateien geändert am: | 08.04.2022 | |||||||
| Promotionsantrag am: | 27.10.2021 | |||||||
| Datum der Promotion: | 02.03.2022 |
