Comment on “Measuring euro area monetary policy” by Carlo Altavilla, Luca Brugnolini, Refet Gürkaynak, Giuseppe Ragusa and Roberto Motto

Abstract Most of the time, ECB monetary policy can be characterized as working through the term structure of riskfree OIS rates, as considered in the paper by Carlo Altavilla and his coauthors. But some very important policy actions over the European debt crisis instead work mainly through sovereign spreads. The database constructed by the authors can also be used to analyze monetary policy surprises that work through these spreads.