The current economic crisis has witnessed a strong deceleration in the growth of international trade. This has been even greater in the cases of the European Union and the eurozone, where the rates of export growth have even reached negative figures. In this paper, the authors examine to which...

We apply a "new" conventional (CAPB-based) measure of fiscal policy, which is less prone to endogeneity issues, and find that a 1-percent of GDP fiscal consolidation leads to the improvement of the current account-to-GDP ratio by approximately 0.8 percent of GDP, while previous research based on...

This paper analyzes the interest rate setting of the European Central Bank (ECB) both before and after the outbreak of the global financial crisis. In the current monetary policy literature, researchers typically select one Taylor rule-based model in order to analyze the interest rate setting of...

The 2007-2008 financial crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis effects rippled through the financial system, banks and sovereign states. We analyze these events, focusing on the Portuguese and Spanish case after providing an insight into the Eurozone. We assessed the pricing of sovereign...

We explain how the external counterpart of the euro area M3 can be analysed by using the euro area balance of payments (b.o.p.). This is possible because the net external assets of the monetary financial institutions (MFIs) are present in two statistical frameworks that follow similar...

We provide an early assessment of the Juncker Commission's contributions to the ongoing reform of the euro area. In doing so, we present a chronological summary of the reform process up to 2014. At the time, the euro area architecture had undergone many changes. These were mainly focused on risk...

During recent years, central banks have increased the levels of their international reserves at an unprecedented pace. In this paper, we introduce new country-specific reserve data and examine determinants of the composition of international reserves. Using a dataset of 36 countries (and the...

We model economic policy uncertainty (EPU) in the four largest euro area countries by applying machine learning techniques to news articles. The unsupervised machine learning algorithm used makes it possible to retrieve the individual components of overall EPU endogenously for a wide range of...