Given the uncertain outcome for regional trade arrangements and given the need for improved international competitiveness due to ongoing globalization it seems advisable to promote at a national level those policies which might help to enhance both integration into the regional and world...

When I wrote my book on EMU four years ago (Kenen 1995), very little had been written on the international dimensions of EMU. There was a chapter in the Commission's path-breaking study (European Commission, 1990). There were papers by Alogoskoufis and Portes (1991, 1992), Cooper (1992),...

Das historische Wochenende vom 1. bis 3. Mai 1998 hat deutlich gezeigt, daß Euphorie und freischwebende Visionen nicht angebracht sind und Nüchternheit vonnöten ist, wenn es um die Analyse der Perspektiven der Europäischen Währungsunion geht. Nun geht es nicht mehr darum, für oder gegen...

This paper uses a Bayesian non-stationary dynamic factor model to extract common trends and cycles from large datasets. An important but neglected feature of Bayesian statistics allows to treat stationary and non-stationary time series equally in terms of parameter estimation. Based on this...

After the global financial crisis and during the European sovereign debt crisis, bank lending to companies in the euro area slowed down dramatically bringing the economy close to a credit crunch. It was only after the start of the ECB’s quantitative easing programme in early 2015 that bank...