Analyzing ongoing changes in the design of regulatory and supervisory authorities over the banking and financial industry in Europe, this comprehensive Handbook pays particular attention to the role of national central banks, the new financial supervisory authorities and the European Central...

The aim of this study is to get a better understanding of which financial stability responsibilities have been delegated to central banks (CBs), how these responsibilities are executed, and whether accountability arrangements are in place. For this purpose, a questionnaire was sent to all CBs in...

Banks play a central role in the functioning of the economy. Not only do they allocate financial resources, they also collectively create money in the process of granting loans. In this way, they have a considerable impact on the type of activities that are financed in society. During the...

This paper reviews recent developments in the management of government debt in the euro area, covering both theoretical and practical aspects. It focuses on key aspects of debt management; the objectives of debt management, its organisation, the maturity of debt, inflation-indexation,...

We develop multivariate measures of synchronicity and co-movement of business cycles. In addition to synchronicity, the co-movement measure takes differences between cycle amplitudes into account that have been overlooked in most previous studies. We apply the new measures to the euro area....

Since the late 1980s, the Dutch economy has outperformed neighbouring countries in terms of employment and GDP growth. We argue that the recent growth performance of the Netherlands has primarily been the result of a correction of the belowaverage performance during the 1970s. This correction...

Using the quantile regression approach it is shown for a sample of 57 developing countries that the relationship between central bank independence and inflation over the period 1975--98 is not robust. Only in the higher quantiles do we find a significant relationship between independence and...

As in many other OECD countries, government investment expressed as share of GDP has decreased in The Netherlands. Using the concept of Granger causality, we test in a bivariate vector autoregression framework various hypothesis that have been put forward to explain this decline. It is concluded...