We confront the notion that flexible rates insulate a country from external disturbances with new evidence on spillovers from euro-area shocks to neighboring countries. We find that in response to euro-area shocks, spillovers are not smaller, and currency movements not significantly larger, in...

The notion that flexible exchange rates insulate a country from foreign shocks is well grounded in theory, from the classics (Meade, 1951; Friedman 1953), to the more recent open economy literature (Obstfeld and Rogo, 2000). We confront it with new evidence from Europe. Specifically, we study how...

Country-specific business cycle fluctuations are potentially very costly for member states of currency unions because they lack monetary autonomy. The actual costs depend on the extent to which consumption is shielded from these fluctuations and thus on the extent of risk sharing across member...

In contrast to the notion that the exchange-rate regime is non-neutral, there is little evidence that EMU has changed the European business cycle. In fact, we find the volatility of macroeconomic fundamentals largely unchanged before and after the introduction of the euro. Exceptions are a...

In the 24 years since its introduction, the euro has experienced a financial crisis, a government debt crisis, a global pandemic, and an energy crisis-and survived. Using a model focusing on households, this Weekly Report shows that the monetary union’s stability is rooted in the fact that the...

The distributional and disruptive effects of energy supply shocks are potentially large. We study the effectiveness of alternative fiscal responses in a two-country HANK model that we calibrate to the euro area. Energy subsidies can stabilize the domestic economy, but are fiscally costly and...

The dollar is a safe-haven currency and appreciates when global risk goes up. We investigate the dollar’s role for the transmission of global risk to the world economy within a Bayesian proxy structural vectorautoregressive model. We identify global risk shocks using high-frequency asset-price...