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This paper provides a structured overview of the burgeoning literature on the economics of CBDC. We document the economic forces that shape the rise of digital money and review motives for the issuance of CBDC. We then study the implications for the financial system and discuss of a number of policy issues and challenges. While the academic literature broadly echoes policy makers' concerns about bank disintermediation and financial stability risks, it also provides conditions under which such adverse effects may not materialize. We also point to several knowledge gaps that merit further work, including data privacy and the study of end-user preferences for attributes of digital payment methods.

In July 2021 the Eurosystem decided to launch the investigation phase of the digital euro project, which aims to provide euro area citizens with access to central bank money in an increasingly digitalised world. While a digital euro could offer a wide range of benefits, it could prompt changes in the demand for bank deposits and services from private financial entities (ECB, 2020a), with knock-on consequences for bank lending and resilience. By inducing bank disintermediation, a central bank digital currency, or CBDC, could in principle alter the transmission of monetary policy and impact financial stability. To prevent this risk, options to moderate CBDC take-up are being discussed widely. In view of the significant degree of uncertainty surrounding the design of a potential digital euro, its demand and the prevailing environment in which it would be introduced, this paper explores a set of analytical exercises that can offer insights into the consequences it could have for bank intermediation in the euro area. Based on assumptions about the degree of substitution between different forms of money in normal times, several take-up scenarios are calculated to illustrate how the potential demand for a digital euro might shape up. The paper then analyses the mechanisms through which commercial banks and the central bank could react to the introduction of a digital euro. Overall, effects on bank intermediation are found to vary across credit institutions in normal times and to be potentially larger in stressed times. Further, a potential digital euro's capacity to alter system-wide bank run dynamics appears to depend on a few crucial factors, such as CBDC remuneration and usage limits.

We study the macroeconomic effects of central bank digital currency (CBDC) in a dynamic general equilibrium model. Timing and information frictions create a need for inside (bank deposits) and outside money (CBDC) to finance production. To steer the quantity of CBDC, the central bank can set the lending and deposit rates for CBDC as well as collateral and quantity requirements. Less restrictive provision of CBDC reduces bank deposits. A positive interest spread on CBDC or stricter collateral or quantity constraints reduce welfare but can contain bank disintermediation, especially if the elasticity of substitution between bank deposits and CBDC is small.

Extending the data set used in Beyer (2009) from 2007 to 2017, we estimate I(1) and I(2) money demand models for euro area M3. Wefind that the elasticities in the money demand and the real wealth relations identified previously in Beyer (2009) have remained remarkably stable throughout the extended sample period, once only a few additional deterministic variables in the long run relationships for the period after the start of the global financial crisis and the ECB' s non-standard monetary policy measures are included. Testing for price homogeneity in the I(2) model we find that the nominal-to-real transformation is not rejected for the money relation whereas the wealth relation cannot be expressed in real terms.

This paper tests the expectations hypothesis (EH) of the term structure of interest rates in US data, using spectral regression techniques that allow us to consider different frequency bands. We find a positive relation between the term spread and the change in the long-term interest rate in a frequency band of 6 months to 4 years, whereas the relation is negative at higher and lower frequencies. We confirm that the variance of term premia relative to expected changes in long-term interest rates dominates at high and low frequencies, leading the EH to be rejected in those bands but not in the intermediate frequency band. JEL Classification: C22, E43

This paper studies the relationships between inflation, economic activity, credit, monetary policy, and residential property and equity prices in 17 OECD countries, using quarterly data for 1986-2006. Using a panel VAR, we find plausible and significant responses to a monetary policy shock. Shocks to asset prices have a positive, significant effect on GDP and credit after three to four quarters, whereas prices start to increase much later. We also consider the transmission of US shocks from the US to the other economies. While monetary policy shocks are transmitted internationally, other shocks are not, perhaps because of the form of coefficient restrictions used.

model for Switzerland. Forecast uncertainty is evaluated in three different dimensions. First, we investigate the effect on forecasting performance of averaging over forecasts from different models. Second, we look at different estimation windows. We find that averaging over estimation windows is at least as effective as averaging over different models and both complement each other. Third, we explore whether using weighting schemes from the machine learning literature improves the average forecast. Compared to equal weights the effect of the weighting scheme on forecast accuracy is small in our application.

Recently, the Bank of Japan outlined a “two perspectives” approach to the conduct of monetary policy that focuses on risks to price stability over different time horizons. Interpreting this as pertaining to different frequency bands, we use band spectrum regression to study the determination of inflation in Japan. We find that inflation is related to money growth and real output growth at low frequencies and the output gap at higher frequencies. Moreover, this relationship reflects Granger causality from money growth and the output gap to inflation in the relevant frequency bands. Keywords: spectral regression, frequency domain, Phillips curve, quantity theory. JEL Numbers: C22, E3, E5

Announced in the autumn of 1998, the monetary policy strategy of the European Central Bank (ECB) quickly became controversial, arguably because the ECB provided neither an explicit representation of the inflation process nor an explanation for why it necessitated the adoption of a two-pillar framework. Several reduced-form empirical models that seek to do so have subsequently been presented in the literature. The hallmark of these models is the hypothesis that inflation can be decomposed into a 'trend', which is explained by a smoothed measure of past money growth, and a deviation from that trend, which is accounted for by the output gap. In this paper we survey this literature, discuss how it relates to the monetary transmission mechanism and extend the inflation equations by introducing cost-push shocks. We find that changes in import prices, oil prices and exchange rates are statistically significant in euro-area inflation equations but that they leave intact the earlier findings that money growth and the output gap matter.

We estimate monetary policy reaction functions for France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States using a Markov-switching model that incorporates switching in the monetary policy regime as well as an independent switching process for shifts in the state of the economy. Results indicate that over time all central banks have assigned changing weights to inflation and the output gap. Regimes can be classified as ``dovish" with a high weight on output and a low weight on inflation, and ``hawkish" with a high weight on inflation and a low one on output. For France and Italy, the German interest rate had an influence on domestic monetary policy especially at the beginning of the 1980s after the inception of the European Monetary System (EMS). Switching in the residual variance of the monetary rule accounts for heteroscedasticity and turns out to be important for the fit of the model. Robustness of the results is checked by considering alternative specifications of expected inflation and the output gap. In general, results are robust to these changes.

Keynesian theory suggests that a reduction in government expenditure has a negative effect on private demand and therefore on output. Contrary, neoclassical theory argues that reduced public expenditure makes room for an expansion of the private sector and thus has a stimulating effect on the economy. Additionally, expectations of a lower tax burden in the future should stimulate consumption. The recent literature discusses that both theories might be right at different times. Especially, during times of fiscal contractions from high levels of debt the economy might react in a neoclassical way. In this paper, we test for non-linear effects of fiscal policy in a Markov-switching approach. We find two different regimes, with a neoclassical regime prevailing around 1972-74, 1979-82 and 1991-93. Furthermore, using time-varying transition probabilities (TVTP) for the Markov process, we test if the neoclassical reaction of private consumption to fiscal variables depends on some!

Though most economists agree that monetary policy has significant effects on the real sector in the short run, interest-rate elasticities of macroeconomic aggregates in general are found to be low. Recently, the credit channel has been discussed as an additional channel through which monetary impulses can exert influence on the real economy. Though the credit channel is difficult to uncover with aggregate data, its distributional implications can be tested with micro data. We investigate balance sheet and income statement data for Austrian firms. Descriptive statistics do not re-ject the notion that monetary policy could have an effect through the so-called bal-ance sheet channel. Panel estimation results show that firms, which are expected to be affected more by asymmetric information and moral hazard problems, are more responsive to internal funds in their investment decisions. Moreover, financial con-straints become more severe in times of restrictive monetary policy.

Recently, money demand functions for a group of European countries have been estimated and generally have been found to perform better than most national money demand functions. While parameter equality is a sufficient condition for valid aggregation of linear equations, in money demand estimation often log-linear specifications are used, so that aggregation is in effect nonlinear. This makes the relation between the aggregate and the individual equations more complicated. To investigate if the conditions for unbiased linear aggregation are also valid for logarithmic aggregation, a simulation study is performed.

Proponents of an aggregation theoretic approach to money demand argue that simple-sum measures do not capture the theoretical notion of money. This is especially true for broad monetary aggregates, which include components held for savings motives that are only imperfect substitutes for transactions media. Simple-sum monetary aggregates thus are not consistent with microeconomic theory. Monetary aggregation in Europe using indices for monetary services seems attractive because these indices can account for the imperfect substitutability between different currencies. In this paper the aggregation theoretic framework is applied to money holdings of European residents and the resulting index is compared to simple-sum M3.

The paper investigates the existence of a stable money demand function for four major european countries. Estimation of individual and aggregate money demand functions is performed using the cointegration framework developed by Engle and Granger (1987). The results for aggregate and individual equations are compared with respect to parameter values, explanatory power, and forecasting performance.