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...

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...

The former EU president Jean-Claude Junker has proposed that all countries of the European Union should also adopt the euro as their currency and recent research has shown that countries currently pursuing this goal indeed fulfill the classical Optimal Currency Area (OCA) criterion of positively...

We provide an early assessment of the Juncker Commission's contributions to the ongoing reform of the euro area. In doing so, we present a chronological summary of the reform process up to 2014. At the time, the euro area architecture had undergone many changes. These were mainly focused on risk...

We present a two-country New Open Economy Macroeconomics model of a currency union featuring an overlapping generations structure of the Blanchard (1985)-Yaari (1965) type as well as monopolistic frictions and staggered adjustment in the goods and labor market. We allow for public investment and...

In the winter 2011/12 a wave of internal capital .ight prompted the ECB to abandon its exit strategy and to announce an unprecedented monetary expansion. We analyze this episode in several dimensions: (i) by providing an event-study analysis covering key variables from national central...

We present an analytically tractable two-country New Open Economy Macroeconomics model of a currency union featuring an overlapping gen- erations structure of the Blanchard (1985)-Yaari (1965) type. It enables us to study the transmission and spillover effects of a wider range of fiscal shocks...