We investigate whether ideology drives the sentiments of parliamentarians when they speak to the central bank they hold accountable. To this end, we collect textual data on the quarterly hearings of the ECB President before the European Parliament from 1999 to 2019. We apply sentiment analysis...

Periods of economic and financial stress traditionally give rise to profound changes in economic theory and in the way policy decisions are taken. Motivated by the recent interest in renewing macroeconomics after the global financial crisis, we collected the views of senior central bank staff in...

This paper provides new empirical evidence on policy-makers' voting patterns on interest rates. Applying (pooled) Taylor-type rules and using real-time information available from published inflation reports and voting records, the paper tests for heterogeneity among committee members in three...

How large should a monetary policy committee be? Which voting rule should a monetary policy committee adopt? This paper builds on Condorcet's jury threorem to analyse the relationships between committee size and voting rules in a model where policy discussions are subject to a time constraint....

This paper shows that a simple two-stage voting mechanism may implement a constrained optimal state dependent decision about a fiscal deficit. I consider a setup with strategic fiscal deficits à la Tabellini and Alesina (1990). Three groups of voters are informed about the productivity of...

In this paper, we use the Furfine (1999) statistical procedure to identify money market operations from Payments Systems data. Given the availability of an alternative data set, recording money market operations we could confirm the accuracy of the method. We examine evidence on integration of...

This paper presents first the estimation of a two-country DSGE model for the euro area and the rest-of-the-world including relevant oil-price channels. We then investigate the optimal resolution of the policy tradeoffs emanating from oil-price disturbances. Our simulations show that the...

In this paper we present a novel approach to the empirical validation of the intertemporal approach to the current account. We develop a calibrated model highlighting the role of consumption smoothing and capital accumulation in the economic convergence process. After solving the model, we...

We propose a new and time-varying optimum currency area (OCA) index for the euro area in assessing the evolution of the OCA properties of the monetary union from an international business cycle perspective. It is derived from the relative importance of symmetric vs. asymmetric shocks that result...

Payments are a key focus of central banks, as - together with the safe, efficient operation of the payments market – wide access to cash is fundamentally important for a healthy economy. In this study, three main research areas were investigated: 1. socioeconomic characteristics that can be...