Using newly assembled data on foreign exchange market intervention, we construct a daily index of exchange market pressure during the 1992-3 crisis in the European Monetary System, allowing us to pinpoint when and where the crisis was most severe. Our analysis focuses on a neglected factor in...

The possibility that the euro area might break up was being raised even before the single currency existed. These scenarios were then lent new life five or six years on, when appreciation of the euro and problems of slow growth in various member states led politicians to blame the European...

The European Monetary Union (EMU) will involve socialization of the existing seigniorage wealth of the national central banks, because the Euro will have to be bought by these banks in exchange for assets which have been accumulated in the historical process of money creation. This socialization...

While the ECB helped mitigate the euro crisis in the aftermath of Lehman, it has stretched its monetary mandate and moved into fiscal territory. This text describes and summarizes the crucial role played by the ECB in the intervention spiral resulting from its bid to manage the crisis. It also...

IMF forecasts and the EU's Fiscal Compact foresee Europe's heavily indebted countries running primary budget surpluses of as much as 5 percent of GDP for as long as 10 years in order to maintain debt sustainability and bring their debt/GDP ratios down to the Compact's 60 percent target. We show...

Data on output and prices for 11 EC member nations are analyzed to extract information on underlying aggregate supply and demand disturbances using a VAR decomposition. The coherence of the underlying shocks across countries and the speed of adjustment to these shocks are then compared to the...

In the UK's 2016 referendum on EU membership, young voters were more likely than their elders to vote Remain. Applying new methods to a half century of data, we show that this pattern reflects both ageing and cohort effects. Although voters become more Eurosceptical as they age, recent cohorts...

Recent proposals for enlarging the European Community to include the EFTA countries raise the question of whether the new members should participate in a European Monetary Union. In part, the issue hinges on the incidence of aggregate supply and demand disturbances. We use data on prices and...

This paper reconsiders the 1992-3 crisis in the European Monetary System in light of its emerging market successors. That episode was a predecessor of the Mexican and Asian crises in the sense that both capital movements and domestic financial fragility placed important roles. The output effects...