We examine the role of money in the policies of the ECB, using introductory statements of the ECB President at the monthly press conferences during 1999-2004. Over time, the relative amount of words devoted to the monetary analysis has decreased. Our analysis of indicators of the monetary policy...

The paper discusses key elements of optimal central bank design and applies its findings to the Eurosystem. A particular focus is on the size of monetary policy committees, the degree of centralization, and the representation of relative economic size in the voting rights of regional (or...

In this paper we address the issue of how transmission uncertainty could affect the choice between a federal monetary policy based on national data and one on aggregated data.We find that the uncertainty about the transmission process increases the need to take into account information about...

Soon, euro area membership could more than double, with the vast majority of accession countries being quite different in economic terms compared with current members. Under the current decision-making system, this can lead to high decisionmaking costs and there is a risk that monetary policy...

The pending enlargement of the European Monetary Union (EMU) has brought to the fore the discussion of the voting right distribution in the European Central Bank (ECB) council. We show that, in a model where labor unions internalize the inflationary consequences of wage setting, deviating from a...

There is a wide consensus that the existence of structural rigidities in the Eurozone reduces the effectiveness of the ECB's monetary policies. In order to test this "ECB-handicap" hypothesis, we perform a meta-analysis of the effects of monetary policies in the US and the Eurozone countries....