This paper examines two competing approaches for calculating current account benchmarks, i.e. the external sustainability approach á la Lane and Milesi-Ferretti (LM) versus the structural current accounts literature (SCA) based on panel econometric techniques. The aim is to gauge the medium...

In this paper, we use the Furfine (1999) statistical procedure to identify money market operations from Payments Systems data. Given the availability of an alternative data set, recording money market operations we could confirm the accuracy of the method. We examine evidence on integration of...

While domestic interbank markets are often considered to work in an efficient way, cross-country bank lending appears to be subjected to market imperfections leading to persistent interest rate differentials. In a model where banks need to cope with liquidity shocks by borrowing or by...

This volume contains a collection of papers, commentaries and speeches concerning the first decade of the euro and the recent global financial crisis.

In this paper, we present a set of specific measures to quantify the state and evolution of financial integration in the euro area. Five key markets are considered, namely the money, corporate bond, government bond, credit and equity markets. Building upon the law of one price, we developed two...

We examine the bilateral composition of international bond portfolios for the euro area and the individual EMU member countries. We find considerable support for “euro area bias”: EMU member countries disproportionately invest in one another relative to other country pairs. Another striking...

Four years after the introduction of the euro, this paper provides an overview of the current structure and integration of the euro area financial systems and related policy initiatives. We first compare the euro area financial structure with that of the United States and Japan. Using new and...

This paper provides new evidence on the dynamics of equity risk premia in euro area stock markets across country and industry portfolios. We develop and estimate a conditional intertemporal CAPM where returns on aggregate euro area, country and industry portfolios depend on the market risk as...

Financial integration in some segments of the financial markets started to deteriorate during the recent period of economic turmoil in Europe. This paper examines whether this phenomenon also holds true for the European retail payments market. In comparison with other segments of the financial...

Although recent research shows that the euro has spurred cross-border financial integration, the exact mechanisms remain unknown. We investigate the underlying channels of the euro’s effect on financial integration using data on bilateral banking linkages among twenty industrial countries in...