We test whether two key elements of the EU and euro area economic governance framework, the Stability and Growth Pact and the Lisbon Strategy, have had any impact on macroeconomic outcomes. We test this proposition using a difference-in-difference approach on a panel of over 30 countries, some...

This paper reviews the governance framework of the Lisbon Strategy and discusses the specific option of increasing the role of benchmarking as a means of improving the implementation record of structural reforms in the European Union. Against this background, the paper puts forward a possible...

During the crisis, support for the EU has declined noticeably in many European Union member states. While previous research on European public opinion has mainly focused on the impact of domestic country- and individual-level factors on public attitudes towards the EU, this paper argues that...

There is a broad consensus that the quality of the political system and its institutionsare fundamental for a country’s prosperity. The paper focuses on political events inItaly over the past 35 years and asks whether the adoption of the euro in 1999 hashelped insulate Italy’s financial...

This paper provides a selective review of the theoretical literature on delegated portfolio management as a principal-agent relationship. The main focus of the paper is to review the analytical issues raised by the peculiar nature of the delegated portfolio management relationship within the...

Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has transformed Europe and has created an integrated pan-European economy. Much research has focused on understanding this integration process and what benefits and costs it entails. This paper identifies a political economy channel of EMU as the monetary union...

We propose a new core inflation measure for the Euro area which places the emphasis on the more lasting, i.e. persistent, price developments at a disaggregated level. The importance of each component of the HICP is reweighted according to its relative persistence, as measured by the sum of the...

This paper sets out to build a synthetic quarterly Divisia monetary aggregate for the euro area using area wide data over the sample period from 1980 to 2000. Then, the analysis proceeds in two separate steps. First, the demand for this Divisia monetary aggregate is evaluated using econometric...

This paper estimates a hybrid New Keynesian model on euro area data and evaluates the performance of different simple policy rules and of the optimal unconstrained rule under commitment. The study reaches two main conclusions. First, inflation is found to be mainly forward-looking in the euro...

Narrow and broad money measures (including Divisia aggregates) have been found to have explanatory power for UK output in backward-looking specifications of the IS curve. In this paper, we explore whether or not real balances enter into a forward-looking IS curve for the UK, building on the...