This article evaluates the asymmetric impact of exchange rate volatility on the exports of nine ECOWAS countries to the Eurozone. By comparing Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) and Nonlinear ARDL (NARDL) models, the study concludes that the effect of volatility on ECOWAS-Eurozone exports...

The 1992 Maastricht Treaty, laid the foundations for the current European Union with its single market in goods, services, capital and labour and established the framework for the creation of the single currency. We study countries that differ in the extent to which they share a common currency...

This paper explores the relationship between working capital management (WCM) strategies and business performance during the COVID-19 crisis. Data from 1,067 non-financial European firms from 33 countries distributed across 6 economic sectors in the period from 2015 to 2021, feed Ordinary Least...

The number of digital currencies has increased significantly in recent years. So-called central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), created by central banks, are at the forefront of this development. Combining the advantages of an electronic means of payment - namely the speed and efficiency of...

This study investigates the impact of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) on monetary policy flexibility, the effective lower bound (ELB), and negative interest rate policies (NIRPs), specifically in the case of the digital euro (DE). Through a combination of theoretical modeling and...

Two years after the COVID-19 pandemic, the Greek economy seems to have overcome the turmoil of the pandemic crisis as well as that of the following energy crisis. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to assume that the Greek economy has returned to a sound state, since this was not really the case...

This paper studies the emergence of sovereign bond yield spreads in the Eurozone prior to the financial crisis. While spreads were close to zero in European government debt markets until the mid-2000s, they have persistently widened since then in many member states. We employ a...

Economic theory has recently begun to consider the economic impact of narratives. Narrative economics can also be extended to the analysis of the economic-political effect of narratives in the context of the European core-periphery divide, which intensified after the European sovereign-debt...

Die EZB und die Europäische Kommission treiben die Einführung eines digitalen Euros offensiv voran. Obwohl viele Details zur technischen Ausgestaltung und Funktionalität noch offen sind, wird damit geworben, dass eine digitale Gemeinschaftswährung mit einer Reihe von Vorteilen für Europa...

This report offers a strategic view on the economic and inflation environment in the euro area as part of the monetary policy strategy assessment 2025. It reassesses the factors shaping the inflation and economic environment in light of the recent inflation experience, analyses changes in...

Following the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-8, Ireland, Slovenia, and Spain set up public Asset Management Companies (AMCs), purchasing delinquent loans equal to 44%, 16%, and 10% of GDP, respectively. Though deemed successful, it's unclear if this was de facto traditional capital and...

We document that compared to all other investor groups investment funds exhibit a distinctly procyclical behavior when financial-market beliefs about the probability of a euro-related, institutional rare disaster spike. In response to such euro disaster risk shocks, investment funds shed...

We examine whether loan portfolio sectoral specialization provides informational advantages to banks, enabling better credit risk assessment. Using euro area credit register data, we compare probabilities of default assigned by specialized and non-specialized banks to the same borrowing firm...

The objective of this article is to present the results of an analysis of how the form of activities of EU banking groups affected their decisions to purchase non-euro area EU government bonds during the COVID-19 pandemic. The dataset consists of the portfolios of government bonds (including...

In this paper, we analyse the effects on the economies of the European Union and the rest of the world, of several austerity policies implemented by the Southern European countries, i.e., Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain. In particular, we simulate the reduction in one point in the government...

In the Hellenistic era, there was widespread convergence to the Attic standard and a similar narrowing of coin types in terms of aesthetics. The competition between issuers resulted in an equilibrium in which improvements to the consistency and quality of money were sought after. This...

We combine modern methods from Speech Emotion Recognition and Natural Language Processing with high-frequency financial data to precisely analyze how the vocal emo- tions and language of ECB President Mario Draghi affect the yields and yield spreads of major euro area economies. This novel...

One of the main goals of launching the EU's second Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) and the respective Markets in Financial Instruments Regulation (MiFIR) was to increase the transparency of transactions in financial markets. Prior to MiFID II, transparency requirements in...

We provide new evidence on the effects of adopting a common European currency on banks' profitability in the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) region. We construct a panel of 1033 bank-year observations across 11 countries between 2006 and 2020. Our results suggest that the effect of the eurozone...

This paper examines the rise of non-bank financial intermediaries (NBFIs) and its implications for financial stability and monetary policy transmission in the Euro Area and the United States. While the U.S. financial system has long been market-based, the Euro Area has experienced a striking...

This paper examines how the ECB's 2022-2023 interest-rate hikes affected euro-area banks' economic net worth and vulnerability to deposit runs. Drawing on granular, confidential data for 139 banks, we estimate each bank's economic net worth and find that unrealised losses on loans and bonds...

We document that compared to all other investor groups investment funds exhibit a distinctly procyclical behavior when financial-market beliefs about the probability of a euro-related, institutional rare disaster spike. In response to such euro disaster risk shocks, investment funds shed...

We compute a common factor summarising asymmetries in the expected distributions of a large set of survey-based economic data series for the euro area. This expected skewness factor is distinct from lower-moment factors and can help improve forecasts of risks to economic activity. In addition,...

The management report is an integral part of the ECB's Annual Accounts and is designed to provide readers with contextual information related to the financial statements. Given that the ECB's activities and operations are undertaken in support of its policy objectives, the ECB's financial...

In the ECB's Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) for the first quarter of 2025, expectations for headline HICP inflation were revised upwards for 2025 from the previous survey (conducted in the fourth quarter of 2024) and were largely unchanged thereafter. At the same time, core inflation...

In the ECB's Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) for the first quarter of 2025, expectations for headline HICP inflation were revised upwards for 2025 from the previous survey (conducted in the fourth quarter of 2024) and were largely unchanged thereafter. At the same time, core inflation...