This paper provides a comprehensive review of the factors that can cause price levels to diverge and which are at the root of different inflation rates in Europe including the EU-27. Among others, we study the structural and cyclical factors influencing market and non-market-based service, house...

This study analyses the impact of economic catching-up on annual inflation rates in the European Union with a special focus on the new member countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Using an array of estimation methods, we show that the Balassa-Samuelson effect is not an important driver of...

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the factors that can cause price levels to diverge and which are at the root of different inflation rates in Europe including the EU-27. Among others, we study the structural and cyclical factors influencing market and non-market-based service, house...

The relation between the ECB's main refinancing (MRO) rates and the money market is key for the monetary transmission process in the euro area. This paper investigates how money market rates respond to the new information revealed by MRO auctions. Our results confirm a stabilizing level...

The financial crisis has deeply affected money markets and thus, potentially, the proper functioning of the interest rate channel of monetary policy transmission. Therefore, we analyze the effectiveness of monetary policy in steering euro area money market rates looking at, first, the...

In this paper we model the volatility of the spread between the overnight interest rate and the central bank policy rate (the policy spread) for the euro area and the UK during the two main phases of the financial crisis that began in late 2007. During the crisis, the policy spread exhibited...

We investigate the e ect of monetary policy on European macroeconomic variables using a small-scale vector autoregression (VAR) and the "Effective Monetary Stimulus" (EMS). The EMS is a monetary policy metric obtained from yield curve data that is designed to consistently reflect the overall...

We propose an arbitrage-free shadow-rate term structure model to analyze the euro-area yield curve from 1999 to mid-2015, when bond yields turned negative at various maturities. In the model the 'shadow rate' can reach any positive or negative level, while the actual one-month rate cannot fall...

I propose a new term structure model for euro area real and nominal interest rates which explicitly incorporates a time-varying lower bound for nominal interest rates. Results suggest that the lower bound is of importance in structural analyses implying time-varying impulse responses of yield...

The estimation of dynamic term structure models (DTSMs) turns out to be challenging in the presence of a small sample. It is exacerbated if the sample is characterized by a prolonged period of low interest rates near a time-varying effective lower bound. These challenges all weigh heavily when...