The European Monetary Policy Responses During the Pandemic Crisis

Abstract

This paper uses an event-based analysis to describe how the European Central Bank’s (ECB’s) policy responses to the pandemic crisis have affected the European financial and economic system. The result of our exercise, which is based on the examination of the main measures taken by the ECB during 2020, is that these responses have positively affected the European economic system by improving banks’ lending activity and by indirectly creating room for expansionary fiscal policies in the euro area’s high-debt countries that do not have fiscal capacity.