The effect of Negative Interest Rate Policy (NIRP) and rate Forward Guidance (FG) on the yield curve is very similar with both policies exerting their maximal impact on a same spectrum of short-to-medium term maturities. Yet, we find that their impact on the predictive interest rate distribution differs. Accommodative FG prices out high interest rate trajectories, thus affecting upper percentiles; NIRP changes the market pricing of the effective lower bound on the policy rate, thus affecting lower percentiles. Building on this evidence, we combine option-implied rate densities with event-study analysis to separate the effects of NIRP and FG. We find that the impact of the ECB's NIRP on forward rates was stronger than that of FG.

We study alternative monetary policy strategies in the presence of the lower bound on nominal interest rates and a low equilibrium real rate using an estimated DSGE model for the euro area. We find that simple feedback rules that implement inflation targeting result in a binding lower bound one-fourth of the time as well as inflation and output exhibiting large downward biases and heightened volatility. Rule-based asset purchases that are activated once the policy rate reaches the lower bound are not able to fully offset the destabilizing effects of the lower bound if we assume plausible limits on the size of purchases. Makeup strategies, especially average inflation targeting with a long averaging window, perform better than inflation targeting. However, differences in performance across strategies become small if the response coefficients of the feedback rules are optimized. In addition, we find that the benefits of makeup strategies tend to vanish if agents exhibit a degree of inattention to central bank policies as estimated in the data.

We identify a novel dimension of monetary policy from high-frequency changes in asset prices around ECB policy events, orthogonal to surprises extracted from risk-free interest rates. We find that it is present in policy events that were interpreted by real-time market commentaries as containing information about asset purchase programmes aimed to stabilise financial markets and safeguard the monetary policy transmission by implementing asset purchases in a flexible manner across asset classes and euro area countries. We label this dimension of policy “market-stabilization QE” to contrast it with conventional QE programmes such as the APP launched by the ECB in 2015 aimed to extract duration risk. When including our market-stabilization QE, the R for the regression of sovereign yields during the sovereign debt crisis increases by about 50 percentage points and the one of the stock market by 35 percentage points; during the COVID-19 pandemic by 25 and 15 percentage points, respectively. Although it moves euro area stressed-country sovereign yields down and German sovereign yields up as a result of the reversal of flight-to-safety dynamics, it generates strong expansionary macroeconomic effects in all euro area countries including Germany. JEL Classification: E43; E44; E52; E58; E65; G01; G14.

The 20th anniversary of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) offers an opportunity to look back on the record of the European Central Bank (ECB) and learn lessons that can improve the conduct of policy in the future. This volume charts the way the ECB has defined, interpreted, and applied its monetary policy framework—its strategy—over the years from its inception, in search of evidence and lessons that can inform those reflections. Our ‘Tale of Two Decades’ is largely a tale of ‘two regimes’: one—stretching slightly beyond the ECB’s mid-point—marked by decent growth in real incomes and a distribution of shocks to inflation almost universally to the upside; and the second—starting well into the post-Lehman period—characterized by endemic instability and crisis, with the distribution of shocks eventually switching from inflationary to continuously disinflationary. We show how the most defining feature of the ECB’s monetary policy framework, its characteristic definition of price stability with a hard 2 per cent ceiling, functioned as a key shock absorber in the relatively high-inflation years prior to the crisis, but offered a softer defence in the face of the disinflationary forces that hit the euro area in its aftermath. The imperative to halt persistent disinflation in the post-crisis era therefore called for a radical, unprecedented policy response, comprising negative policy rates, enhanced forms of forward guidance, a large asset purchase programme and targeted long-term loans to banks. We study the multidimensional interactions among these four instruments and quantify their impact on inflation and the macroeconomy.

The ECB’s price stability mandate has been defined by the Treaty. But the Treaty has not spelled out what price stability precisely means. To make the mandate operational, the Governing Council has provided a quantitative definition in 1998 and a clarification in 2003. The landscape has changed notably compared to the time the strategy review was originally designed. At the time, the main concern of the Governing Council was to anchor inflation at low levels in face of the inflationary history of the previous decades. Over the last decade economic conditions have changed dramatically: the persistent low-inflation environment has created the concrete risk of de-anchoring of longer-term inflation expectations. Addressing low inflation is different from addressing high inflation. The ability of the ECB (and central banks globally) to provide the necessary accommodation to maintain price stability has been tested by the lower bound on nominal interest rates in the context of the secular decline in the equilibrium real interest rate. Against this backdrop, this report analyses: the ECB’s performance as measured against its formulation of price stability; whether it is possible to identify a preferred level of steady-state inflation on the basis of optimality considerations; advantages and disadvantages of formulating the objective in terms of a focal point or a range, or having both; whether the medium-term orientation of the ECB’s policy can serve as a mechanism to cater for other considerations; how to strengthen, in the presence of the lower bound, the ECB’s leverage on private-sector expectations for inflation and the ECB’s future policy actions so that expectations can act as ‘automatic stabilisers’ and work alongside the central bank.

We analyse the implications of asymmetric monetary policy rules by estimating Markov-switching DSGE models for the euro area (EA) and the US. The estimations show that until mid-2014 the ECB’s response to inflation was more forceful when inflation was above 2% than below 2%. Since then, the ECB’s policy can be characterised as symmetric, and we quantify the macroeconomic implications of this policy change. We uncover asymmetries also in the Fed’s policy, which has responded more strongly in times of crisis. We compute an optimal simple rule for the EA and the US in an environment with the effective lower bound and a low neutral real rate, and find that it prescribes a stronger response to inflation and the output gap when inflation is below target compared to when it is above target. We document its stabilisation properties had this optimal rule been implemented over the last two decades.

This report discusses the role of the European Union’s full employment objective in the conduct of the ECB’s monetary policy. It first reviews a range of indicators of full employment, highlights the heterogeneity of labour market outcomes within different groups in the population and across countries, and documents the flatness of the Phillips curve in the euro area. In this context, it is stressed that labour market structures and trend labour market outcomes are primarily determined by national economic policies. The report then recalls that, in many circumstances, inflation and employment move together and pursuing price stability is conducive to supporting employment. However, in response to economic shocks that give rise to a temporary trade-off between employment and inflation stabilisation, the ECB’s medium-term orientation in pursuing price stability is shown to provide flexibility to contribute to the achievement of the EU’s full employment objective. Regarding the conduct of monetary policy in a low interest rate environment, model-based simulations suggest that history-dependent policy approaches − which have been proposed to overcome lasting shortfalls of inflation due to the effective lower bound on nominal interest rates by a more persistent policy response to disinflationary shocks − can help to bring employment closer to full employment, even though their effectiveness depends on the strength of the postulated expectations channels. Finally, the importance of employment income and wealth inequality in the transmission of monetary policy strengthens the case for more persistent or forceful easing policies (in pursuit of price stability) when interest rates are constrained by their lower bound.

This paper provides new empirical evidence that bears on the efficacy of unconventional monetary policies when the main policy rate is negative. When a negative interest rate policy (NIRP) is deployed in concert with rate forward guidance (FG) and quantitative easing (QE), the identification of the impacts of these unconventional instruments of monetary policy is challenging. We propose a novel identification approach that seeks to overcome this challenge by combining a dense, controlled event study with forward curve counterfactuals that we construct using predictive rate densities derived from rate options. We find that NIRP has exerted a sizeable influence on the term structure of interest rates throughout maturities while, on net, the impact of rate FG has been more muted. QE explains the lion's share of yield effects, particularly over the back end of the yield curve. We then feed these rate counterfactuals into a large-scale Bayesian VAR and generate alternative histories for the euro area macro-economy that one would likely have observed between 2013 and 2020 in no-NIRP (with or without FG) and in no-QE regimes. According to this conditional forecasting exercise, in 2019 GDP growth and annual inflation would have been 1.1 p.p. and 0.75 p.p. lower, respectively, and the unemployment rate 1.1 p.p. higher than they actually were, had the ECB abstained from using NIRP, FG and QE over the previous six years or so.

The design of the European Central Bank (ECB) reflected a decades-long evolution of academic thinking and real-world experience concerning the optimal practice of central banking. In this chapter, we aim to unpack these influences and explain how they motivated both the drafters of the ECB’s statute and the economists in the national central banks who set the ECB up. We concentrate on the ideas that were dominant at the turn of the last century and the principles that were seen to constitute ‘good’ monetary governance, including the notion that monetary policy should focus primarily on price stability. We show how these principles were not only echoed in the EU Treaty, but also ‘hard-coded’ into the policy framework that, by the second half of the 1990s, had come to prominence in academic and policy circles: inflation targeting and its counterpart in econometrics, the New Keynesian model.

The culmination of the European Central Bank’s (ECB) policy evolution was the ‘combined arms strategy’ that started taking shape in 2014–2015. In this chapter, we review how four unconventional measures—negative interest rates, asset purchases, targeted lending operations, and forward guidance—were progressively combined into a unified policy package. We recount the sequence of ‘recalibrations’ of these tools that took place between December 2015 and June 2018 and the internal debates that informed them. We then conduct an impact analysis where we seek to isolate and examine the contribution of the policy package to financial conditions and macroeconomic outcomes. The novelty of our analysis lies both in its methodological approach and in its diagnostics, which allows us to disentangle the respective contribution of each instrument and assess counterfactual scenarios in which they were not combined. We end by considering some of the side effects of our unconventional policies with a focus on the banking sector.

That the euro area economy had switched over into the second regime described in Chapter 3 became more evident in the last phase of the crisis. In this chapter, we describe the landscape facing the ECB in 2013 and 2014, with disinflationary demand shocks replacing inflationary cost-push shocks as the dominant force in the economy. With conventional policy unavailable, we outline the series of unconventional policies launched by the European Central Bank (ECB) to avert a multi-year depression and the deflation scenario that would have accompanied it. We chart the evolution from a policy of ‘separation’ to one of ‘combination’, with different policies seen as mutually reinforcing in fighting deflation risks. We illuminate how the ECB responded to key obstacles such as breaking through the zero lower bound (ZLB) on interest rates and implementing liquidity policies in a deleveraging banking sector.

This chapter offers a comprehensive account of the European Central Bank’s (ECB) actions in the early phases of the financial crisis. We show how, despite stubborn inflation pressures, the ECB responded effectively to post-Lehman shock, <italic>inter alia</italic> by quantifying the effect of moving to ‘fixed rate with full allotment’ lending in regular and longer-term operations. We nonetheless demonstrate that the potency of this response was partially constrained by the ECB’s <italic>‘passive’</italic> approach to liquidity provision—which hinged on demand from banks—and the <italic>‘separation principle’</italic> between interest rate decisions and liquidity operations. We lay out how these principles began to dissolve with the launch of the ECB’s first bond-buying programmes—the Securities Market Programme in 2010 and the Outright Monetary Transactions programme in 2012—and quantify the effects of these measures. In particular, we document the sequence of events that led up to President Draghi’s famous ‘whatever it takes’ announcement.

We evaluate the effects on asset prices of the ECB asset purchase program (APP) announced in January 2015 and assess its main transmission channels. We do so by first extending a term structure model with bond supply effects to account for assets with different types of risk premia. We then derive model-based predictions for cross-asset price movements associated with the transmission channels identified in the model. We finally validate empirically these predictions by means of an event- study methodology, reaching the following conclusions: The impact of the APP on asset prices is sizeable albeit the program was announced at a time of low financial distress. This may appear puzzling in light of existing literature that finds a large impact of asset purchases only in periods of high financial distress. Consistent with the model, we explain this apparent puzzle by showing how the low financial distress, while indeed weakening certain transmission channels, has reinforced other channels because of its interplay with the asset composition of the program. Targeting assets at long maturity and spanning the investment-grade space have supported the duration and the credit channels. At the same time, the low degree of financial stress prevailing at announcement of the program, while weakening the local supply channel, has facilitated spill-overs to non-targeted assets.

The policy framework of the European Central Bank (ECB) attracted both bouquets and brickbats in the pre-crisis era. This chapter aims to assess those arguments with hindsight: was policy successful in delivering the objective or was it instead ‘inattentive’, as some critics at the time claimed? We argue that the euro area economy faced a series of inflationary supply shocks and the policy framework was helpful in those conditions. The perceived asymmetry of the inflation objective—with a hard ‘ceiling’ at 2%—allowed automatic adjustments in underlying conditions, including inflation expectations, to do a large part of the stabilization job. However, we show that this self-stabilizing mechanism also admits a second regime: if the economy enters a situation where negative demand shocks dominate, the ‘ceiling’ ceases to bind and act as a stabilizer, leading inflation to drift downwards. We contend that the ECB may have entered such a regime after the financial crisis.

While the EU Treaty established the European Central Bank’s (ECB) primary objective as price stability, defining price stability was left to the ECB’s Governing Council (GC). This chapter shows how the GC chose to formulate an objective that subtly but consciously differed from the standard inflation targeting framework of the time. Rather than expressing a preference for a particular rate of inflation, a ‘target’ that could be changed if circumstances changed, it opted to qualify price stability unconditionally as an inflation rate below 2%. We explain some of the factors behind this decision and describe the process whereby, already in 2003, the ECB’s monetary policy strategy came to be reviewed. The internal debates that informed the ECB’s characteristic ‘below but close to 2%’ objective and ‘two pillar’ strategy are discussed. The chapter also focuses on the ECB’s early critics.

This paper presents a toolkit for generating optimal policy projections. It makes five contributions. First, the toolkit requires a minimal set of inputs: only a baseline projection for target and instrument variables and impulse responses of those variables to policy shocks. Second, it solves optimal policy projections under commitment, limited-time commitment, and discretion. Third, it handles multiple policy instruments. Fourth, it handles multiple constraints on policy instruments such as a lower bound on the policy rate and an upper bound on asset purchases. Fifth, it allows alternative approaches to address the forward guidance puzzle. The toolkit that accompanies this paper is Dynare compatible, which facilitates its use. Examples replicate existing results in the optimal monetary policy literature and illustrate the usefulness of the toolkit for highlighting policy trade-offs. We use the toolkit to analyse US monetary policy at the height of the Great Financial Crisis. Given the Fed’s early-2009 baseline macroeconomic projections, we find the Fed’s planned use of the policy rate was close to optimal whereas a more aggressive QE program would have been beneficial.

This chapter offers a comprehensive account of the European Central Bank’s (ECB) actions in the early phases of the financial crisis. We show how, despite stubborn inflation pressures, the ECB responded effectively to post-Lehman shock, inter alia by quantifying the effect of moving to ‘fixed rate with full allotment’ lending in regular and longer-term operations. We nonetheless demonstrate that the potency of this response was partially constrained by the ECB’s ‘passive’ approach to liquidity provision—which hinged on demand from banks—and the ‘separation principle’ between interest rate decisions and liquidity operations. We lay out how these principles began to dissolve with the launch of the ECB’s first bond-buying programmes—the Securities Market Programme in 2010 and the Outright Monetary Transactions programme in 2012—and quantify the effects of these measures. In particular, we document the sequence of events that led up to President Draghi’s famous ‘whatever it takes’ announcement.