This paper analyzes the effects of different labor market institutions on inflation and output volatility. The eurozone offers an unprecedented experiment for this exercise: since 1999, no national monetary policies have been implemented that could account for volatility differences across...

Using harmonized micro data, this paper investigates the effects of the early phase (2008-10) of the recent economic crisis on transitions between labour market states in Europe. Our analysis focuses on individual heterogeneity, on the type of employment contract, and on cross-country...

It is widely believed that the current recession has soured public attitudes towards immigration. But most existing studies are cross sectional and can shed little light on the economy-wide forces that shift public opinion on immigration. In this paper I use the six rounds of the European Social...

We study the response of real wages to the business cycle in eight major Eurozone countries before and during the Great Recession. Average real wages are found to be acyclical, but this reflects, in large part, the effect of changes in the composition of the labour force related to unemployment...

This paper aims at providing a detailed analysis of the leading indicator properties of corporate bond spreads for real economic activity in the euro area. In- and out-of-sample predictive content of corporate bond spreads are examined along three dimensions: the bonds' quality, their term to...

This paper develops a DSGE model where banks use short-term deposits to provide firms with long-term credit. The demand for long-term credit arises because firms borrow in order to finance their capital stock which they only adjust at infrequent intervals. Within an RBC framework, we show that...

We seek to quantify the impact on euro area GDP of the European Economic Recovery Plan (EERP) enacted in response to the financial crisis of 2008-09. To do so, we estimate an extended version of the ECB's New Area-Wide Model with a richly specified fiscal sector. The estimation results point to...

How much did fiscal policy contribute to euro area real GDP growth during the Great Recession? We estimate that discretionary fiscal measures have increased annualized quarterly real GDP growth during the crisis by up to 1.6 percentage points. We obtain our result by using an extended version of...