This paper briefly assesses the effectiveness of the different non-standard monetary policy tools in the Euro Area. Its main focus is on the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) Programme which is praised by some as the ECB’s “magic wand”. Moreover, it discloses further possible unintended...

This contribution focuses on the consequences of the natural disaster in Japan for the world financial markets as seen around half a year after the nuclear accident happened. It, thus, focuses on expectations about what would happen in macroeconomics terms later on. For this purpose, it examines...

This paper empirically assesses the impact of specialisation on the synchronisation of regional business cycles in two core countries of EMU, namely France and Germany. Several specialisation indices are introduced and some first stylised facts about interregional business cycle correlations are...

The impact of global banking on financial stability and the connected post-crisis challenges have been under-researched before the crisis. We interpret ‘global banking’ as ‘global central banking’, focus on the role of international monetary policies and global liquidity for financial...

The purpose of this contribution is to illustrate the interaction between oil prices and the global savings equilibrium which can invert the usual IS type relationship between growth and interest rates. Higher growth is usually associated with higher interest rates. But higher growth leads to...

This paper examines the importance of the economic sentiments of some macroeconomic key variables in Estonia, Slovenia and Latvia. We analyze the importance of domestic as well as foreign sentiments with respect to these economies against the background of their accession to the European...

We investigate the linkage between business cycle convergence and financial portfolio choice for a panel of 18 EU countries. We construct an index of similarity of financial portfolios which we then put into context with the view that “the financial world” has an impact on business cycles...

The current instruments in the EU to deal with debt and liquidity crises include the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism (EFSM). Both are temporary in nature (3 years). In terms of an efficient future crisis management framework one has...

High equilibrium unemployment and the inflation bias in some EU countries require fundamental reforms of labour-market institutions. Impacts of different monetary regimes inside and outside EMU on the incentives for labour- market reforms are examined in a Barro- Gordon framework from the...