Asset price volatility in EU-6 economies: how large is the role played by the ECB?

In this paper we provide evidence that the effects of the different waves of asset purchase programmes implemented by the ECB from 2009 onwards have spilled over into asset price volatility developments of a group of six Central and Eastern European economies belonging to the EU but not to the euro area. This has partly shielded their financial markets from the negative shocks that have influenced international investors’ degree of risk aversion in recent years. By means of a dynamic conditional correlation multivariate GARCH model, and by resorting to three different proxies to describe the functioning and measure the impact of the ECB’s asset purchase programmes, we show that such non-standard monetary measures have played a significant role in dampening volatility spikes in the financial markets of the countries at stake. This probably reflects how both a ‘risk taking’ and a ‘liquidity’ channel of transmission actually work. The results are generally robust to an extensive series of tests, and to changes made in the estimation methodology.