Mortgages constitute the largest part of household debt. An essential choice when taking out a mortgage is between fixed-interest-rate mortgages (FRMs) and adjustable-interest-rate mortgages (ARMs). However, so far, no comprehensive cross-country study has analyzed what determines household...

The paper analyzes the integration of euro area sovereign bond markets during the European sovereign debt crisis. It tests for contagion (i.e., an intensification in the transmission of shocks across countries), fragmentation (a reduction in spillovers) and flight-to-quality patterns, exploiting...

Does the general public know what central banks do? Is this kind of knowledge relevant? Using a survey of Dutch households, we investigate these questions for the case of the European Central Bank (ECB). Our findings suggest that knowledge on the ECB's objectives is far from perfect. Both a weak...

In this paper, we explore the role of labor markets for monetary policy in the euro area in a New Keynesian model in which labor markets are characterized by search and matching frictions. We first investigate to which extent a more flexible labor market would alter the business cycle behaviour...

In this paper, we outline a version of the New Area-Wide Model (NAWM) of the euro area designed for use in the (Broad) Macroeconomic Projection Exercises regularly undertaken by ECB/Eurosystem staff. We present estimation results for the NAWM that are obtained by employing Bayesian inference...

This paper examines monetary transmission and macroeconomic shocks in a medium scale macroeconomic model with costly banking estimated for euro area data. In addition to data on measures of real activity and prices, we include data on bank loans, loan rates, and reserves for the estimation of...