We analyze the benefits and costs of a non-euro country opting-in to the banking union. The decision to opt-in depends on the comparison between the assessment of the banking union attractiveness and the robustness of a national safety net. The benefits of opting-in are still only potential and...

Europe's policy-makers are engaged in protracted discussion on whether and how to increase the size of the euro rescue funds (the EFSF and the ESM). In this Policy Brief, Daniel Gros and Thomas Mayer argue that this attention on the headline size of the EMS and EFSF is misplaced. They propose...

This paper explores the domestic and international effects of an increase in observed interest rates (conventional monetary policy) and expected interest rates (forward guidance). We find significant spillovers to a broad range of countries when both are subject to a tightening shock: Output...

We use a factor model and elastic net shrinkage to model a high-dimensional network of European CDS spreads. Our empirical approach allows us to assess the joint transmission of bank and sovereign risk to the non-financial corporate sector. Our findings identify a sectoral clustering in the CDS...

We estimate a three-country model using 1995-2013 data for Germany, the Rest of the Euro Area (REA) and the Rest of the World (ROW) to analyze the determinants of Germany's current account surplus after the launch of the Euro. The most important factors driving the German surplus were positive...

One way of evaluating how well monetary authorities perform is to provide the public with a regular and independent second opinion. The European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England (BoE) are shadowed by professional and academic economists who provide a separate policy rate recommendation...