What is the link between the financial cycle – financial booms, followed by busts – and the real economy? What is the direction of this link and how salient is this connection? This unique book examines these fundamental questions and offers a paramount contribution to the debate...

The recent financial crisis has been characterized by unprecedented monetary policy interventions of central banks with the intention to stabilize financial markets and the real economy. This paper sheds light on the actual impact of monetary policy on stock liquidity and thereby addresses its...

We analyse the bank interest rate pass-through in the euro area for the period 1999:1–2009:11, relating market interest rates to bank retail rates of comparable maturities. We first estimate single equation error correction models for seven interest rate categories and ten euro area countries...

We analyse the dynamics of the standard deviation of demand and supply shocks as well as of the demand component of GDP across countries in the European Monetary Union (EMU). This analysis allows us to evaluate the patterns of cyclical comovement in EMU and compare them to the cyclical...

We propose the analysis of the dynamics of the standard deviation of business cycles across euro area countries in order to evaluate the patterns of cyclical convergence in the European Monetary Union for the period 1960–2008. We identify significant business cycle divergence taking place in...