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...

This paper investigates the impact of natural disasters on price stability in the euro area. We estimate panel and country-specific structural vector autoregression (VAR) models by combining estimated damages of disaster events with monthly data for the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP)...

We disentangle the effects of monetary policy announcements on real economic variables into an interest rate shock component and a central bank information shock component. We identify both components using changes in interest rate futures and in exchange rates around monetary policy...

Exploiting the heteroscedasticity of the changes in short-term and long-term interest rates and exchange rates around the FOMC announcement, we identify three structural monetary policy shocks. We eliminate the predictable part of the shocks and study their effects on financial variables and...

Der Euro wurde vor mehr als 20 Jahren eingeführt und wird auch seinen 25. Geburtstag erleben. Angesichts der schweren Krisen, die der Euro als gemeinsamer Währungsraum in den letzten Jahren zu überstehen hatte, ist das ein überraschender Erfolg. Unter anderem machten Populist*innen in den...

Following the end of the coronavirus pandemic, the European Central Bank (ECB) was confronted with an unprecedented increase in energy prices. This led to consumer price inflation in the euro area far beyond the ECB's inflation target of two percent, at times up to 10 percent. At the same time,...

Wenige Themen erhitzen die Gemüter in Deutschland so stark wie das Thema Inflation, denn sie trifft jeden einzelnen empfindlich: Das angesparte Geld verliert an Wert und die Reallöhne sinken. Zusätzlich wirkt sich die Entscheidung der Europäischen Zentralbank (EZB), mit der sie regulär auf...

How does a monetary union alter the impact of business cycle shocks at the household level? We develop a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian model of two countries (HANK2) and show in closed form that a monetary union shifts the adjustment to a shock horizontally - across countries - within the...

The term structure of interest rates is crucial for the transmission of monetary policy to financial markets and the macroeconomy. Disentangling the impact of monetary policy on the components of interest rates, expected short rates, and term premia is essential to understanding this channel. To...