In the debate on global imbalances, the euro area countries did not receive much attention so far. While the current account is on balance for the entire area, divergences between individual member states have increased since the introduction of the common currency. In this paper, the imbalances...

Despite the fact that Argentina has been suffering from a recession for years, the timing and severity of the recent currency crisis surprised most observers. This paper analyzes the role of fundamentals and self-fulfilling speculation in the Argentinean crisis. Arguing within a theoretical...

Russia's foreign debt problems worsened substantially after the financial crisis of 1998. The paper focuses on the key role of the government in servicing foreign debt and promoting institution building by showing how foreign debt influences the choice between official and unofficial taxation....

We use household survey data from Hungary to analyse the determinants of foreign currency (FX) borrowing. We do not find evidence that Hungarian FX borrowers are better educated, wealthier or more risk-loving than their peers. In fact, FX borrowing is a common phenomenon driven mostly by...

The paper analyses the global spillovers of the Federal Reserve's unconventional monetary policy measures. First, we find that Fed measures in the early phase of the crisis (QE1), but not since 2010 (QE2), were highly effective in lowering sovereign yields and raising equity markets in the US...

The Greek government budget situation plays a central role in the debt crisis in the euro area. The debt to GDP ratio is above 150 percent, while the deficit to GDP ratio exceeds 10 percent. To re-establish the Maastricht criteria, respectively, strong consolidation measures need to be...

We use household survey data from Hungary to analyse the determinants of foreign currency (FX) borrowing. We do not find evidence that Hungarian FX borrowers are better educated, wealthier or more risk-loving than their peers. In fact, FX borrowing is a common phenomenon driven mostly by...

This paper studies the bank-sovereign link in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium set-up with strategic default on public debt. Heterogeneous banks give rise to an interbank market where government bonds are used as collateral. A default penalty arises from a breakdown of interbank...

Deviations of policy interest rates from the levels implied by the Taylor rule have been persistent before the financial crisis and increased especially after the turn of the century. Compared to the Taylor benchmark, policy rates were often too low. This paper provides evidence that both...

This paper analyses the effects of newspaper coverage of macro news on the spread between the yield on the 10-year German Bund and on sovereign bonds in eight countries belonging to the euro area (Belgium, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain) using daily data for...