Governments of most accession countries in Central and Eastern Europe initially expressed keen interest to adopt the Euro as soon as possible. The fervour seems to have cooled somewhat in the meantime. This paper will argue that there are good reasons for mixed feelings. While monetary...

With a view to establishing a Capital Markets Union (CMU), efforts to integrate (private) capital markets and private risk-sharing in the European Union are underway. However, the single (capital) market will be burdened by a perennial potential threat to sovereign bond market stability in the...

Every initiative that potentially increases the effectiveness of monetary policy is welcome. The European Union’s Capital Markets Union (CMU) project is potentially a point in case, even though monetary policy is not a policy target of CMU. Increasingly developed capital markets in the EU are...

Europe’s financial landscape has substantial institutional variety. This reflects different societal responses to (or preferences with regard to) trade-offs. For monetary policy, it implies a challenging environment, particularly in times of financial crises. Using a non-linear VAR-model we...

A Capital Markets Union (CMU) is the great hope of European policymakers. The plan for a CMU tries to reduce the reliance of European investors on banks and build up a market-based risk-sharing channel between member states. Our empirical analysis raises doubts that this can be achieved through...

Compared to the U.S., the euro area has been underperforming in the wake of the Great Financial Crisis (GFC). This holds especially true for peripheral euro area economies. Whereas the U.S. is characterised by a financial system dominated by arms’ length (capital-market oriented) interaction...

The paper discusses some widely used methods for estimating output gaps based on aggregated datafor the Euro-zone. Though these methods exhibit some common features, an empirical comparisondemonstrates that the various techniques differ substantially. In particular, the correlation of output...

This paper addresses the issues of identification and dating of the Euro-zone business cycle by using the Markov-switching approach innovated by Hamilton in his analysis of the US business cycle. Regime shifts in the stochastic process of economic growth in the Euro-zone are identified by...

This paper investigates the Euro-area business cycle using a multivariate autoregressive time series model with cointegration. The cointegration restrictions help to identify permanent and transitory shocks which form the stochastic part of trend and cyclical GDP, respectively. The...