The ECB’s price stability mandate has been defined by the Treaty. But the Treaty has not spelled out what price stability precisely means. To make the mandate operational, the Governing Council has provided a quantitative definition in 1998 and a clarification in 2003. The landscape has...

The US economy has endured an exceptionally severe recession caused by the measures put in place to contain the spread of COVID-19. This occasional paper assesses the impact of this crisis on key labour market variables, such as (un-) employment, wages and productivity, and highlights the...

The US economy has endured an exceptionally severe recession caused by the measures put in place to contain the spread of COVID-19. This occasional paper assesses the impact of this crisis on key labour market variables, such as (un-)employment, wages and productivity, and highlights the...

This report discusses the role of the European Union’s full employment objective in the conduct of the ECB’s monetary policy. It first reviews a range of indicators of full employment, highlights the heterogeneity of labour market outcomes within different groups in the population and across...

Since the March 2023 banking turmoil, a policy debate has emerged concerning the unprecedented scale and speed of the observed deposit outflows. Have recent stress episodes and developments in technology structurally changed depositors' behaviour? Are the Basel III liquidity coverage ratio (LCR)...

Well-functioning risk-sharing arrangements are essential for the shock absorbing capacity and resilience of an economy, even more so for countries in a monetary union where the single monetary policy is unable to address asymmetric shocks. The common shocks that euro area member states have been...

This paper summarises the outcomes of the analysis of the ECB Crypto-Assets Task Force. First, it proposes a characterisation of crypto-assets in the absence of a common definition and as a basis for the consistent analysis of this phenomenon. Second, it analyses recent developments in the...

This paper critically reviews the theoretical basis for the provision of the global financial safety net (GFSN) and provides a comprehensive database covering four elements of the GFSN (foreign exchange reserves, IMF financing, central bank swap lines and regional financing arrangements) for...

Well-functioning risk-sharing arrangements are essential for the shock absorbing capacity and resilience of an economy, even more so for countries in a monetary union where the single monetary policy is unable to address asymmetric shocks. The common shocks that euro area member states have been...

This paper summarises the outcomes of the analysis of the ECB Crypto-Assets Task Force. First, it proposes a characterisation of crypto-assets in the absence of a common definition and as a basis for the consistent analysis of this phenomenon. Second, it analyses recent developments in the...