This paper compares impulse responses to monetary policy shocks in the euro area countries before the EMU and in the New Member States (NMS) from central-eastern Europe. We mitigate the small sample problem, which is especially acute for the NMS, by using a Bayesian estimation that combines...

Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has transformed Europe and has created an integrated pan-European economy. Much research has focused on understanding this integration process and what benefits and costs it entails. This paper identifies a political economy channel of EMU as the monetary union...

This paper analyses the relationship between openness to trade and wages at the industry level (15 manufacturing industries) in 25 EU countries over the period from 1995 to 2005. By applying a cross-country and industry-specific approach, it is possible to control for unobserved heterogeneity at...

The purpose of his paper is to evaluate the empirical relevance of real convergence on the process of nominal convergence for the new EU Member States. We discuss two of the main channels through which real convergence could affect relative prices with respect to the euro area productivity...

Is inflation persistence in the new EU Member States (NMS) comparable to that in the euro area countries? We argue that persistence may not be as different between the two country groups as one might expect. We confirm that one should work carefully with the usual estimation methods when...

This paper analyses the rapid trade integration of the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) with the euro area in the past ten years and draws implications for further integration. We use as benchmark an enhanced gravity model estimated for a large sample of bilateral trade flows...