In this paper we argue that, for a group of converging economies of the European Union, participation in the euro area has been associated with easier access to financing by domestic economic agents. Easier access to financing was a significant impulse leading to a sharp increase in households'...

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the impact of capitalising durable goods on the Euro area household saving ratios and disposable incomes for the first time. The reason for this exercise is twofold. Firstly, it is generally accepted that individual households regard consumer durables as...

We study the relationship between fiscal policy and household saving across the euro area countries for the period 1999-2019. To this extent, we propose a thick modelling approach, which allows a vast number of model specifications in a dynamic panel setting. We find that fiscal expansions are...

Since the late-1990s, the global economy is characterised by historically low risk premia and an unprecedented widening of external imbalances. This paper explores to what extent these two global trends can be understood as a reaction to three structural shocks in different regions of the global...

We address the question of whether the heterogeneity in savings is partly due to differences in pension wealth across individuals and across countries, using a European harmonised wealth survey (HFCS) combined with estimates of pension wealth (OECD). First, we find significant displacement...

We study interest rates transmission to savings at low and negative rates. Exploiting cohorts of consumers from a data-rich multi-country survey, we show how the strength of interest rate transmission to savings varies with the level of nominal interest rates. This response is positive when...

The prices of futures contracts on short-term interest rates are commonly used by central banks to gauge market expectations concerning monetary policy decisions. Excess returns - the difference between futures rates and the realized rates - are positive, on average, and statistically...

An aggregation exercise is proposed that aims at investigating whether the fast average adjustment of the disaggregate inflation series of the euro area CPI translates into the slow adjustment of euro area aggregate inflation. We first estimate a dynamic factor model for 404 inflation...