We analyze the effect of the business cycle on price dispersion in Europe. Five decades of price level dispersion data for Europe enable us to distinguish short-term influences from long-term influences like market integration. We find that at the business cycle frequency, price dispersion...

This paper estimates a monetary policy reaction function for the ECB over the period 1999-2009. To allow for a potential shift in interest rate setting during the financial crisis, we permit a smooth transition from one set of parameters to another. The estimates show a swift change in the...

Persistent price differences across euro area countries are an indication of incomplete economic integration. We analyze long and short run developments of price level dispersion in the euro area and compare the results with the situation in the US. We find that monetary and economic integration...

The financial cycle captures systematic patterns in the financial system and is closely related to the concept of procyclicality of systemic risk. This paper investigates the characteristics of financial cycles using a multivariate model-based filter. We extract cycles using an unobserved...

Under monetary union, economic dynamics may diverge across countries due to regional inflation differentials and a pro-cyclical real interest rate channel, yet stability is generally ensured through endogenous adjustment of the real exchange rate. The speed of adjustment depends, inter alia, on...

Recent studies find that short-term fluctuations in EMU have been symmetric. This finding leads to benign views on the functioning of EMU as an optimum currency area (OCA), that are difficult to reconcile with the sovereign debt crisis. We try to solve this puzzle by looking at medium-term...

Several attempts have been made in the economics literature to measure money laundering. However, the adequacy of these models is difficult to assess, as money laundering takes place secretly and, hence, goes unobserved. An exception is trade-based money laundering (TBML), a special form of...