Quantitative Easing in the Euro Area - An Event Study Approach

Florian Urbschat and Sebastian Watzka

No 6709, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We examine the effects of the Asset Purchase Programme (APP) gradually introduced by the European Central Bank from September 2014 onwards. Studying the short-term reaction of financial markets after APP press releases, we analyse the development of bond yields and spreads around these releases. More precisely, we try to estimate different asset price channels by quantifying the cumulative decrease of spreads and by running event regressions for several Euro Area countries. Focusing on the signalling channel, measured by the OIS rate, and the portfolio rebalancing channel, proxied by the conditional bond-OIS spread, we find that the effects in yield and spread reduction were most pronounced for the initial announcement on the Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP) but declined afterwards for additional announcements. Possible explanations for this are the declining degree to which the ECB surprised markets and the increasingly burdensome institutional set-up of the APP. While yield reductions were larger for periphery countries’ than for core countries’ bonds, our evidence suggests that this stronger reduction is mostly due to a decreasing risk component of southern bonds. In fact, once controlling for this implicit credit risk reduction we find rather mild effects from portfolio rebalancing for all countries.

Keywords: large scale asset purchase; yield curve; quantitative easing; APP; event study (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E43 E44 E52 E58 G14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-mac and nep-mon
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp6709.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_6709

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().