In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, central banks started being confronted with severe challenges that led to an unprecedented policy response in terms of the size and variety of monetary policy measures. One such measure centred on central banks communicating to the public more...

Purpose - This paper investigates the development of efficiency and the progress of banking integration in the European Union by checking for convergence among banks of European and Eurozone countries as well as contrasting the results with those of United States banks....

This paper analyzes the effects of time-varying fiscal policy behavior on output and consumption multipliers within a monetary union. The framework is that of a standard New Keynesian twocountry model with distortionary taxes and Calvo price rigidities. I first show that multipliers differ...

Using a difference-in-differences identification strategy on a micro panel at the bank and firm level, we study the transmission effectiveness of ECB’s large-scale asset purchasing programs programs (i.e. APP and PEPP) in the Euro area. Our findings show: first, balance sheet composition of...

A key element of the European reform agenda is to simplify the EU fiscal governance framework by moving towards a single debt anchor and a single operational indicator as the basis for formulating fiscal targets and assessing compliance. This paper puts forward an in-depth analysis of two...

The decline of “natural real interest rates” during the last three decades is a common phenomenon in all advanced economies and can be explained by a number of structural factors: the downward trend in potential growth; population ageing, which has led to higher savings rates in many...

The rapid recovery of demand combined with supply constraints has led to rising prices during the past months. This is evident in oil and gas markets, but also in international trade, which has been thrown out of step by bottlenecks at Asian ports. This situation creates a trade-off for the...

I study the welfare performance of a policy regime of fiscal activism in which fiscal policy acts as an automatic stabilizer and controls inflation, while monetary policy pegs the nominal interest rate. When evaluated through the lens of a standard New Keynesian model, accounting for price and...

We examine the sustainability of public finances and its determinants for 19 Eurozone countries from 1995 to 2020. We conclude for the existence of panel cointegration between government revenues and expenditures; primary government balance and one-period lagged public debt-to-GDP ratio; and...

This paper studies how banks' balance sheets and funding costs interact in the transmission of monetary-policy rates to banks' credit supply to firms. To do so, we use creditregistry data from Germany and Portugal together with the European Central Bank's policy-rate cuts in mid-2014. The...

Labour market developments in the Euro area diverged significantly since 2008. Economic literature frequently refers to labour mobility as pillar for the functioning of currency areas. Applying the CGE model PuMA, we quantitatively analyse to what extent labour mobility can contribute to...

The Russian government’s attack on Ukraine and the spiral of sanctions that has been set in motion have heightened inflationary pressure - especially in Europe. The EU’s high dependency on Russian oil and gas imports harbours the risk that inflation in Europe will rise significantly and that...

This working paper offers some considerations on the monetary policy framework of the European Central Bank. The trade-offs arising from adopting a point target configuration over a range target one are assessed in terms of their flexibility vs. inflation anchoring properties. This layout is...

This paper shows that a different communication style of the European Central Bank (ECB) affects stock prices differently. A break in the ECB's communication from 2016 onwards makes it necessary to adjust the identification of monetary policy surprises in the euro area. By modifying the...

While all EU Member States can join the group's monetary union, the euro area, some members are far more ready for the adoption and use of the single European currency. Here, we construct a new Monetary Union Readiness Index (MURI) for the EU Member States. The theoretical framework of the index...

This paper studies the international transmission of the euro area's monetary policy and financial stress to Russia. The results show that financial stress in the euro area damages Russian economic activity and stock prices, but not its trade balance. The contractionary euro area monetary policy...

There have been numerous attempts to reform the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) after the Great Recession, however the reform success varies greatly among sub-fields. Additionally, the political science research community has engaged a diverse set of theory- driven explanations, causal...

The EU's Treaties were designed to limit the interaction between fiscal and monetary policies. However, over the last decade, the introduction of the ECB's Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) programme and its sovereign bond purchase programmes have created some strong linkages between monetary...

Using two measures of the fiscal position, the cyclically adjusted primary budget balance (CAPB) and the total budget balance, we assess the Twin Deficit Hypothesis for the Euro Area in the period 1995-2020. Furthermore, we estimate time-varying coefficients of the current account balance...

We address the question in this paper's title using an estimated New Keynesian DSGE model of the euro area with trend inflation, imperfect indexation, and a lower bound on the nominal interest rate. In this setup, a decrease in the steady-state real interest rate, r*, increases the probability...

This paper describes the theoretical structure and estimation results for a DSGE model for the Macedonian economy. Having as benchmark the model of Copaciu et al. (2015), modified to allow for a fixed exchange rate, we are able to match relatively well the volatility observed in the data. Given...

This paper develops a two-block Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) to estimate the spillover of external shocks to the Maltese economy. The model focuses on five broad macroeconomic shocks hitting the euro area; an aggregate demand shock, two aggregate supply shocks which respectively proxy...

This study examines major reform proposals of EU fiscal rules from an economic and legal perspective. We disassemble the reform proposals in their components and analyse them in their specific proposed form in comparison, thereby shedding light on what is legally possible, economically sensible,...

The joint effect of the global economic and sovereign debt crisis forced the European Central Bank (ECB) to apply conventional and non-standard expansionary monetary policy interventions in order to stabilize eurozone economies. We conducted a panel regression econometric analysis to study the...

The pandemic that erupted in 2020 generated a significant increase in public debt, which is likely to draw the attention of economic policy and the economic profession to the evolution and sustainability of debt. This study first shows how the gross sovereign nominal consolidated government debt...

Can fixed exchange rate regimes cause output divergence among member states? We show that such divergence is a long-run equilibrium characteristic of a two-region model with fixed exchange rates, heterogeneous labor markets, and endogenous growth. Under flexible exchange rates, monetary policy...

The aim of this paper is to investigate business cycle synchronization between seven candidate countries to the Euro Area (EA) - Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Sweden - and the Euro Area (EA-12/EA-19), France and Germany. The Hodrick-Prescott filter is used to...

In July 2021 the Eurosystem decided to launch the investigation phase of the digital euro project, which aims to provide euro area citizens with access to central bank money in an increasingly digitalised world. While a digital euro could offer a wide range of benefits, it could prompt changes...

In this paper, we investigate to what extent sovereign stress and banking stress have contributed to the increase in the level and in the heterogeneity of non-financial firms’ refinancing costs in the Euro area during the European debt crisis and how they did affect the monetary transmission...