A multiplex financial network approach to policy evaluation: the case of euro area Quantitative Easing

Over the last decades, both advanced and emerging economies have experienced a striking increase in the intra-financial activity across different asset classes and increasingly complex contract types, leading to a far more complex financial system. Until the 2007-2008 crisis, the increased financial intensity and complexity was believed beneficial in making the financial system more resilient and less vulnerable to shocks. However, in 2007-2008, the advanced economies suffered the biggest financial crisis since the 1930s, followed by a severe post-crisis recession, questioning the adequacy of traditional tools in predicting, explaining, and responding to periods of financial distress. In particular, the effect of complex interconnections among financial actors on financial stability has been widely acknowledged. A recent debate focused on the effects of unconventional policies aimed at achieving both price and financial stability. Among these unconventional policies, Quantitative Easing (QE, i.e., the large-scale asset purchase programme conducted by a central bank upon the creation of new money) has been recently implemented by the European Central Bank (ECB). In this context, two questions deserve more attention in the literature. First, to what extent, the resources provided to the banking system through QE are transmitted to the real economy. Second, to what extent, the QE may also alter the pattern of intra-financial exposures and what are the implications in terms of financial stability. Here, we address these two questions by developing a methodology to map the multilayer macro-network of financial exposures among institutional sectors across financial instruments (i.e., loans and deposits, debt securities, and equity), and we illustrate our approach on recently available data. We then test the effect of the implementation of ECB’s QE on the time evolution of the financial linkages in the multilayer macro-network of the euro area, as well as the effect on macroeconomic variables, such as consumption, investment, unemployment, growth, and inflation. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1007/s41109-018-0098-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.