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We study whether the stability of mutual funds and the propensity of a run among investors depend on the ownership structure. Flows of funds run by banks or by firms that belong to the same financial group as a bank are less volatile and less sensitive to bad past performance. This enables bank-affiliated funds to better weather distress and to hold lower precautionary cash buffers in comparison with their unaffiliated peers. Banks provide liquidity support to distressed affiliated funds increasing their stakes in funds that are experiencing large outflows. We find that liquidity support and other benefits of bank affiliation are stronger if the parent bank is more liquid and better capitalised. Analyzing the aftermath of two exogenous shocks to financial markets -- the Brexit referendum and political uncertainty in Italy -- we show that distress in the banking system spills over to the mutual fund sector via ownership links.

We propose a new methodology, based on machine learning algorithms, for the automatic detection of outliers in the data that banks report to the Bank of Italy. Our analysis focuses on granular data gathered within the statistical data collection on payment services, in which the lack of strong ex ante deterministic relationships among the collected variables makes standard diagnostic approaches less powerful. Quantile regression forests are used to derive a region of acceptance for the targeted information. For a given level of probability, plausibility thresholds are obtained on the basis of individual bank characteristics and are automatically updated as new data are reported. The approach was applied to validate semi-annual data on debit card issuance received from reporting agents between December 2016 and June 2018. The algorithm was trained with data reported in previous periods and tested by cross-checking the identified outliers with the reporting agents. The method made it possible to detect, with a high level of precision in term of false positives, new outliers that had not been detected using the standard procedures.

Specialness is a measure of the scarcity premium of procuring a specic security. We analyze the impact of security-specic supply and demand on specialness. After controlling for the auction cycle on the supply of the bonds, we show that specialness is higher for highly demanded bonds - in the repo and in the cash market - and for bonds with lower available supply. The ECB outright purchases provide a natural experiment to analyze the impact on the scarcity premium of a big buy-to-hold investor on bonds. We nd evidence of both a stock and a ow eect of the purchases. These eects are amplied when purchases involve bonds already in high demand. The impact of the purchases on specialness is conditional on the amount of the same security already bought. Very special bonds have a higher probability to be underlying a fail-to-deliver transaction.

The Euro area economic activity and banking sector have shown substantial fragility over the last years with remarkable country heterogeneity. Using detailed data on lending conditions and standards, we analyse how financial fragility has affected the transmission mechanism of the single Euro area monetary policy during the crisis until the end of 2011. The analysis shows that the monetary transmission mechanism has been time-varying and influenced by the financial fragility of the sovereigns, banks, firms and households. The impact of monetary policy on aggregate output is stronger during the financial crisis, especially in countries facing increased sovereign financial distress. This amplification mechanism, moreover, operates mainly through the credit channel, both the bank lending and the non-financial borrower balance-sheet channel. Our results suggest that the bank-lending channel has been partly mitigated by the ECB nonstandard monetary policy interventions. At the same time, when looking at the transmission through banks of different sizes, it seems that, until the end of 2011, the impact of credit frictions of borrowers have not been significantly reduced, especially in distressed countries. Since small banks tend to lend primarily to SME, we infer that the policies adopted until the end of 2011 might have fall short of reducing credit availability problems stemming from deteriorated firm net worth and risk conditions, especially for small firms in countries under stress. JEL Classification: E44, E52, E58, G01, G21, G28

We analyze the impact on lending standards of short-term interest rates and macroprudential policy before the 2008 crisis, and of the provision of central bank liquidity during the crisis. Exploiting the euro area institutional setting for monetary and prudential policy and using the Bank Lending Survey, we show that in the period prior to the crisis, in an environment of low monetary policy interest rates, bank lending conditions unrelated to borrowers' risk were softened. During the same period, we also provide some suggestive evidence of excessive risktaking for mortgages loans. At the same time, we show that the impact of low monetary policy rates on the softening of standards may be reduced by more stringent prudential policies on either bank capital or loan-to-value ratios. After the start of the 2008 crisis, we find that low monetary rates helped to soften lending conditions that were tightened because of bank capital and liquidity constraints, especially for business loans. Importantly, this softening effect is stronger for banks that borrow more long-term liquidity from the Eurosystem. Therefore, the results suggest that monetary policy rates and central bank provision of long-term liquidity complement each other in working against a possible credit crunch for firms. JEL Classification: E51, E52, E58, G01, G21, G28

Credit supply and demand changes are mostly unobserved, thus identifying completely the transmission of monetary policy through the credit channel is unfeasible. Bank lending surveys by central banks, however, contain reliable quarterly information on changes in loan conditions due to bank, firm and household balance sheet strength and on changes in loan demand. Using the U.S. and the unique Euro area surveys, we find that the credit channel amplifies a monetary policy shock on GDP and prices, through the balance-sheets of households, firms and banks. For corporate loans, amplification is highest through the bank lending and the borrower's balance sheet channel; for households, demand is the strongest channel.

Shadow banking, as one of the main sources of financial stability concerns, is the subject of much international debate. In broad terms, shadow banking refers to activities related to credit intermediation and liquidity and maturity transformation that take place outside the regulated banking system. This paper presents a first investigation of the size and the structure of shadow banking within the euro area, using the statistical data sources available to the ECB/Eurosystem. Although overall shadow banking activity in the euro area is smaller than in the United States, it is significant, at least in some euro area countries. This is also broadly true for some of the components of shadow banking, particularly securitisation activity, money market funds and the repo markets. This paper also addresses the interconnection between the regulated and the non-bank-regulated segments of the financial sector. Over the recent past, this interconnection has increased, likely resulting in a higher risk of contagion across sectors and countries. Euro area banks now rely more on funding from the financial sector than in the past, in particular from other financial intermediaries (OFIs), which cover shadow banking entities, including securitisation vehicles. This source of funding is mainly shortterm and therefore more susceptible to runs and to the drying-up of liquidity. This finding confirms that macro-prudential authorities and supervisors should carefully monitor the growing interlinkages between the regulated banking sector and the shadow banking system. However, an in-depth assessment of the activities of shadow banking and of the interconnection with the regulated banking system would require further improvements in the availability of data and other sources of information. JEL Classification: C22, E27

This study examines empirically the information content of the euro area Bank Lending Survey for aggregate credit and output growth. The responses of the lending survey, especially those related to loans to enterprises, are a significant leading indicator for euro area bank credit and real GDP growth. Notwithstanding the short history of the survey, the findings are robust across various specifications, including “horse races” with other well-known leading financial indicators. Our results are supportive of the existence of a bank lending, balance sheet, and risk-taking channel of monetary policy. They also suggest that price as well as non-price conditions and terms of credit standards do matter for credit and business cycles. Finally, we discuss the implications for the 2007/2009 financial and economic crisis. JEL Classification: C23, E32, E51, E52, G21, G28

We analyze the root causes of the current crisis by studying the determinants of bank lending standards in the Euro Area using the answers from the confidential Bank Lending Survey, where national central banks request quarterly information on the lending standards banks apply to customers. We find that low short-term interest rates soften lending standards for both businesses and households and, by exploiting crosscountry variation of Taylor-rule implied rates, that rates too low for too long soften standards even further. The softening is over and above the improvement of borrowers’ creditworthiness and all the relevant lending standards are softened, thus implying that banks’ appetite for (loan) risk increases. In addition, high securitization activity and weak banking supervision standards amplify the positive impact of low short-term interest rates on bank risk-taking, even when we instrument securitization. Moreover, short-term rates – directly and in conjunction with securitization activity and supervision standards – have a stronger impact on bank risk-taking than long-term interest rates. These results help shed light on the origins of the current crisis and have important policy implications. We obtain similar results using data from the Senior Loan Officer Survey from the United States, which will be incorporated in the next version of the paper.