This paper offers a comprehensive comparison of the structure of banking and financial markets in the euro area. Based on this, several hypotheses about the role of banks in monetary policy transmission are developed. Many of the predictions that have been proposed for the U.S. are deemed...

We address this question using an estimated New Keynesian DSGE model of the Euro Areawith trend inflation, imperfect indexation, and a lower bound on the nominal interest rate. Inthis setup, a decrease in the steady-state real interest rate, r*, increases the probability ofhitting the lower...

In many countries, wage changes tend to be clustered in the beginning of the year, with wages being set for fixed durations of typically one year. This has been, in particular, documented in recent years for European countries using microeconomic data. Motivated by this evidence we build a model...