Essays on money demand and monetary policy transmission in Europe ; Essays über die Geldnachfragefunktion und die Transmission der Geldpolitik in Europa
This dissertation addresses different aspects of monetary policy: money demand, the transmission of monetary policy through bank loans on the real economy and the impact of liquidity supplied by central banks on interbank lending rates. Regionally the focus is on Europe or rather the euro area and Switzerland. In the first paper of this dissertation, a money demand function is estimated with panel data of the country-specific monetary aggregates. The second paper - Are bank loans important for output growth? A panel analysis of the euro area - uses the residuals from the previous estimated money demand function as instruments for bank loans. It aims to investigate whether the volume of bank loans is still important for output growth in the euro area. The paper - The liquidity effect on the Swiss franc Libor during the financial crisis - investigates whether this liquidity created by the Swiss National Bank has helped to lower the interbank lending rates during the financial crisis. All addressed topics deal with the implications of monetary policy. They focus on the impact of monetary policy decisions on interest rates, corporate bank lending and the real economy. The findings reveal that it is insufficient just to consider the transmission of monetary policy through the interest rate as bank lending is affected as well. Through this additional channel monetary shocks are transmitted to the real economy caused by a change in loan supply. The results of my work show how monetary policy might have functioned in the crisis and where it reached its limits. In the third paper I investigate how the Swiss National Bank conducted its monetary policy after the operational interest rate had been lowered to zero. According to the analysis the enormous liquidity supplied to corporate bank played a crucial role to decrease the interbank interest rate. Worldwide the central banks put in all their potential tools and more to face the crisis: they cut interest to virtually zero and supplied extra liquidity which might have led ...