The thesis consists of three chapters. First two chapters are investigations on how certain factors related to banks affect the transmission of the monetary policy. In both chapters I benefit from bank lending surveys and I use the vector autoregression techniques for estimation. First chapter considers the effect of the banking sector health. I explore the effect of certain banking sector characteristics on the response of the banks’ credit standards following monetary policy shocks in Euro Area and if the banks’ response matter regarding the response in the output. I find the banking sector characteristics, primarily the capitalization, are important. The second chapter focuses on the impact of the uncertainty on the response in the banks’ credit standards to monetary policy. Covering the period of the recent crisis and its aftermath, using the US data, I find banks are more responsive when uncertainty is elevated and the monetary policy to be more effective overall, unlike what the prevailing view of policy ineffectiveness is suggesting, through the credit channel. The last chapter researches the relation between the economic size of the state and the immigrants’ skills. I find the proportion of the high skilled immigrants reduces in the overall immigrants with the tax revenue to GDP ratio. I use an instrument to set the causal effect and the second contribution of the chapter is about setting the World War II as an exogenous event in explaining the differences in the state sizes until recently for the OECD countries in the sample.