This paper explains how banking supervision within the EU, and in Finland in particular, can be improved by the implementation of greater market discipline and related changes. Although existing EU law, institutions, market structures and practices of corporate governance restrict the scope for...

Using information from a variety of sources, including our own estimates from quarterly data for each of the countries over the period 1972–1997, this paper suggests that the exchange rate will play an important role in the transmission of the impact of monetary policy through to the real...

The Finnish Consumer Barometer was introduced in autumn 1987. Data were first collected twice a year and from August 1991 until September 1995 quarterly. After Finland joined the European Union in 1995, the survey was adopted as one member of the Harmonised Consumer Survey of the European...

This paper examines inflation dynamics in Europe. Econometric specification tests with pooled European data are used to compare the empirical performance of the New Classical, New Keynesian and Hybrid specifications of the Phillips curve. Instead of imposing any specific form of expectations...

The emergence of the New Consensus in monetary policy has been followed by a renewal of interest in central banks’ operating procedures, and specifically in the role of open market operations. There is a general view that overnight interest rates are most effectively controlled by standing or...

Recent cross-country comparisons of bank efficiency have been based on pooled estimates of banks across countries and have typically assumed a common frontier and that differences in performance among banks are primarily due to disparities in certain country-specific aspects of banking...

This paper examines progressive changes in productivity of the European stock exchange industry using non-parametric frontier techniques. Within the framework of Malmquist indices, total factor productivity growth is decomposed into technological progress and technical efficiency change for a...

Averaging the reserve requirement is often considered an efficient way to reduce volatility at the very short end of the money market yield curve. The Bank of Finland began to apply an averaging provision at the beginning of October 1995. Notably, the volatility of the overnight rate of interest...

This paper provides an answer to the question of how to improve the forecasting performance of a macro model to better account for economic developments and how to evaluate the forecasting uncertainty. The main tool in this assessment is stochastic simulation. Stochastic simulations in this...