In the aftermath of the financial crisis trust, in the European Central Bank (ECB) has reached an historical low. Taking panel data and using a fixed effects DFGLS estimation for a 12–country sample over the time period 1999 to 2011 with a total of 312 observations, this paper detects a...

Trust in the ECB has fallen to unprecedented lows in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Up to the start of the recession in 2008, trust levels in the ECB were moderately high and trust in the ECB was not affected by business cycle variables such as growth and inflation. This changed...

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...

There is often a gap between the prescriptions of an 'optimal' tax system and actual tax systems, some of which can be neither efficient economically nor efficient at redistributing income. With a focus on personal income taxes, this paper reviews the political economics literature on tax...

We test the hypothesis that the government bond markets in the Eurozone are more fragile and more susceptible to self-fulfilling liquidity crises than in stand-alone countries. We find evidence that a significant part of the surge in the spreads of the PIGS countries in the Eurozone during...