The belief that the ECB follows the US Federal Reserve in setting its policy is so entrenched with market participants and commentators that the search for empirical support would seem to be a trivial task. However, this is not the case. We find that the ECB is indeed often influenced by the...

What policy objective should a common central bank in a heterogeneous monetary union pursue? Should it base its decisions on the EU-wide average of inflation and growth or should it instead focus on (appropriately weighted) national rates of inflation and growth? We find that a central bank that...

Most countries commonly classified as 'in transition' are st ill recognisably different from other countries with a similar income per capita in some respects: a larger share of their work force is in industry, they use more energy, they have a more extensive infrastructure and invest more in...

What policy objective should a common central bank in a heterogeneous monetary union pursue? Should it base its decisions on the EU-wide average of inflation and growth or should it instead focus on (appropriately weighted) national welfare losses based on national rates of inflation and growth?...

This paper shows that countries with weak banking system and fiscal institutions, should benefit from the presence of foreign banks, which can constitute a commitment and transparency device. Foreign banks can also reduce the probability of self-fulfilling speculative attacks. A strong presence...

The ECB has been arguing in the past that since there is no trade-off between price stability and financial stability, the pursuit of price stability is the best a central bank can do to also maintain financial stability. We argue that there is a potential trade-off between price stability and...

This paper presents a simple, basic model to compute the welfare consequences of the introduction of a tariff on the CO2 content of imported goods in a country that already imposes a domestic carbon tax. The main finding is that the introduction of a carbon import tariff increases global welfare...

This paper analyzes whether differences in institutional structures on capital markets contribute to explaining why some OECD-countries, in particular the Anglo-Saxon countries, have been much more successful over the last two decades in producing employment growth and in reducing unemployment...

Labor market performance has differed considerably between OECD countries over the last two decades. The focus of the literature so far has been to ask whether these differences can be explained by varying degrees of labor market rigidities and generosity of welfare states. This paper takes a...

Anglo-Saxon countries have been successful in the 1990s concerning labor market performance compared to the former role models Germany and Japan. This reversal in relative economic performance might be related to idiosyncracies in financial markets with bank-based financial markets as in Germany...