There is a broad consensus that the quality of the political system and its institutions are fundamental for a country's prosperity. This paper focuses on Italy's troubled politics over the past 35 years and asks whether the adoption of the euro in 1999 has helped insulate Italy's financial...

The main task of central banks is to set the level of short-term nominal interest rates in reaction to economic developments, with the aim of achieving their statutory objectives (typically some combination of inflation and output variability). If agents are forward-looking, central banks can...

This paper investigates how money markets in the USA, Germany (up to 1998) and the euro area (since 1999) react to monetary policy announcements by the Federal Reserve, Bundesbank and ECB. We find that interest rates respond strongly to domestic monetary policy throughout, whereas the response...