EMU driven interest rate convergence has led to a significant reduction of borrowing costs for some European governments in the second half of the nineties. The paper deals with the possible consequences for deficit behaviour. Although the impact of interest rates on deficits is a crucial...

Lending and borrowing interest rates are often slow to adjust to changing capital market conditions. This paper argues that national differences of the pass-through speed in the EU can be regarded as a retail-oriented indicator of financial integration. Based on an ECB database the speed of...

This contribution develops a blueprint for a European fiscal union. The proposal addresses the shortcomings of most other reform designs which do not offer a solution for insolvent or non-cooperative euro countries. We suggest a design which combines fiscal insurance with an orderly procedure to...

We use event study regressions to compare the impact of EU monetary versus fiscal policy announcements on government bond spreads of ten euro member countries. Our motivation is to evaluate which of the two players – the ECB or the EU fiscal level – has been more crucial for the...

This study develops a reform proposal for the future revenue system of the EU budget. The findings strongly reject the idea that a reform based on an EU tax-based own resource would remedy current problems. Against the background of the status quo analysis the authors present a reform model...

Der Rat der Europäischen Zentralbank (EZB) steht vor einer schwierigen Entscheidung. Ratsmitglieder haben die Märkte in den vergangenen Monaten auf eine erneute geldpolitische Lockerung eingestimmt. Der EZB-Präsident und andere Ratsmitgliederargumentieren damit, dass die aktuelle...

In this analysis, we investigate ECB communication by analyzing more than 3,800 speeches from 1999 until 2022. The study measures the attention which ECB Council members pay to various implicit and explicit monetary policy objectives. While price stability, according to the Maastricht Treaty, is...