Andrea Venegoni

Since macro-prudential stress tests have become the main instruments of the supervisory authorities' toolkit, the debate on the effect of their results disclosure inflamed. Our work aims at providing a framework that, via a dynamic estimation of the betas, allows to observe the impact of the new information flow on the stability of the banking system. What we find is that, contrary to literature wisdom, almost all banks betas decrease, as the transparency shock contributes to an overall systemic risk drop.

Financial markets vest an important role both in conveying monetary policy innovations to the real economy and in shaping business cycle's fluctuations. Hence, it becomes crucial to assess whether the ECB is able to wield homogeneous reactions in the main Eurozone stock markets and to quell their turbulences. The empirical analysis shows that conventional policy rate shifts affect unevenly the equity indices of the countries analysed, generating asymmetries between their business cycles. Moreover, the ECB stance proved unable to weather the storm and trigger an economic recovery. This calls for a refinement of ECB conduct and justifies the extensive employment of unconventional measures to revive the economy.

Since its inception, EMU adequacy to be an Optimal Currency Area was questioned, and, along with it, the homogeneous transmission of the monetary impulses across the Eurozone. Adopting a Bayesian Time-Varying parameter FAVAR model that fixes the flaws present in the existing literature and exploits a sufficiently extended dataset, we provide an updated assessment of the transmission mechanism's functioning and of its symmetry along these first years of ECB operations. The empirical analysis shows that the occurrence of the two crises significantly altered the policy transmission, with the interest rate channel being the most affected. Policy-wise, our findings suggest that authorities must push towards a consistent innovation both on fiscal and monetary sides.