A growing body of literature indicates that competition increases bank soundness. Applying an industrial organization based approach to large data sets for European and U.S. banks, we offer new empirical evidence that efficiency plays a key role in the transmission from competition to soundness....

This paper tests whether the proposition that globalisation has led to greater sensitivity of domestic inflation to the global output gap (the global output gap hypothesisʺ) holds for the euro area. The empirical analysis uses quarterly data over the period 1979-2003. Measures of the global...

Several factor-based models are estimated to investigate the role of country-specific trade and survey data in forecasting euro areamanufacturing production. Following Boivin and Ng (2006), the emphasis is put on the role of dataset selection on the empirical performance of factor models. First,...

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...

The EMU accession countries are obliged to fulfill the Maastrich convergence criteria prior to entering the EMU. This paper uses a DSGE model of a two-sector small open economy, to address the following question: How do the Maastricht convergence criteria modify optimal monetary policy in an...

This paper compares two contrasting approaches to robust monetary policy design. The first developed by Hansen and Sargent (2003, 2007) assumes unstructured model uncertainty and uses a minimax robustness criterion to design monetary rules. This contrasts with an older literature that structures...

The ECB objective is set in terms of year on year growth rate of the Euro area HICP. Nonetheless, a good deal of attention is given to national data by market analysts when they try to anticipate monetary policy moves. In this paper we use the Generalized Dynamic Factor model to develop a set of...

Short-term fiscal indicators based on public accounts data are often used by European policy makers. They represent one of the main sources of publicly available intra-annual fiscal information. Nevertheless, these indicators have received limited attention from the academic literature analysing...

In this paper, we examine the macroeconomic effects of alternative fiscal consolidation policies in the New Area-Wide Model (NAWM), a two-country open-economy model of the euro area developed at the European Central Bank (cf. Coenen et al., 2007). We model fiscal consolidation as a permanent...

This paper relates the size of the cyclical inflation differentials, currently observed for euro area countries, to the differences in labor market institutions across the same set of countries. It does that by using a DSGE model for a currency area with sticky prices and labor market frictions....