Pas disponible en français
Francesca Faella
- 24 September 2025
- ECONOMIC BULLETIN - ARTICLEEconomic Bulletin Issue 6, 2025Details
- Abstract
- Despite payment digitisation, euro banknote demand remains robust and has sharply intensified during crises. This article examines the role of cash as a safe haven and contingency instrument during four diverse crisis episodes in the euro area (the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the April 2025 Iberian blackout and the Greek sovereign debt crisis), each differing in shock type (health, geopolitical, infrastructure, sovereign debt) and geographical scope (euro area-wide, regional and national). We combine descriptive analysis of monthly and daily currency data with Bayesian causal impact models using daily net issuance and automated teller machine (ATM) withdrawals. This allows us, for the first time in this context, to statistically attribute significant public demand surges to specific shocks. The results highlight that the unique attributes of cash – its tangibility, offline functionality and status as a direct central bank liability – become paramount during stress, across different types of crises and geographies, fulfilling specific roles in each case. We argue that, beyond individual utility, cash provides crucial system-wide benefits such as payment redundancy and decentralised liquidity. These findings underscore the importance of policies ensuring continued access to cash and recognising its fundamental contribution to economic stability and crisis preparedness.
- JEL Code
- E41 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Money and Interest Rates→Demand for Money
E58 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit→Central Banks and Their Policies
E42 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Money and Interest Rates→Monetary Systems, Standards, Regimes, Government and the Monetary System, Payment Systems
H12 : Public Economics→Structure and Scope of Government→Crisis Management
C54 : Mathematical and Quantitative Methods→Econometric Modeling→Quantitative Policy Modeling
- 18 September 2025
- WORKING PAPER SERIES - No. 3115Details
- Abstract
- In this paper, we empirically investigate how suitability concerns detected by the SSM in the fitness and propriety of management body appointees impact the performance of European banks in the period 2014-2023. We provide evidence that management body appointees where the assessment of the supervisory authorities raised concerns, had a negative impact on the bank’s future performance. The negative effect can be attributed to appointees where the supervisory assessment revealed such severe concerns that ancillary measures were imposed. These results outline the importance of the SSM’s work for safeguarding the quality of bank’s corporate governance and suggest that the Supervisors seem to be effective in pointing out those appointees that exhibit severe concerns. In addition, we find that the designation of female appointees by supervised entities increased the bank’s performance sustainably. This result indicates that stimulating diversity, in terms of gender, in the management bodies of banks positively contributed to bank performance.
- JEL Code
- G21 : Financial Economics→Financial Institutions and Services→Banks, Depository Institutions, Micro Finance Institutions, Mortgages
G28 : Financial Economics→Financial Institutions and Services→Government Policy and Regulation
G30 : Financial Economics→Corporate Finance and Governance→General
M14 : Business Administration and Business Economics, Marketing, Accounting→Business Administration→Corporate Culture, Diversity, Social Responsibility