This study of approximately 170 publications shows (a) that US academic economists concentrated on the question "Is the EMU a good or bad thing?", usually adopting the paradigm of optimum currency areas as their main analytical vehicle, (b) that they displayed considerable scepticism towards the...

Variables commonly used, in a panel setting, to explain unemployment rate developments (e.g. Bassanini and Duval (2006a, 2006b)) provide similarly good fit for structural unemployment rate, as measured by the Commission services (i.e. the so-called NAWRU). Those variables include labour market...

Coordination arrangements should ensure that fiscal policy is conducted in a consistent manner across the various public entities and sub-sectors of general government. This dimension has gained in relevance as recent fiscal governance reforms in the European Union have put a premium on sound...

Why is Greece such a surprisingly closed economy? We employ a gravity model of trade to explain the appallingly poor export performance of Greece and argue that weak institutional quality accounts for a large part of this shortfall. Using a rich dataset of bilateral value-added exports of goods...

We study the impact of the introduction of the European Monetary Union on inflation uncertainty. Two groups of economies, one consisting of three European Union members which are not part of the EMU and one of six OECD member economies, are used as control groups to contrast the effects of...

There is a general consensus that monetary stability in Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) requires sustainable public finances of the member states. In order to maintain a high degree of sustainability in Stage III of EMU, attention might shift away from the numerical criteria regarding overall...

This document presents an analysis on the importance of the provision of information and technical assistance by large companies to their small business partners.

We investigate the behaviour of gross capital flows and net capital flows for euro area member countries. We highlight the extraordinary boom-bust cycles in both gross flows and net flows since 2003. We also show that the reversal in net capital flows during the crisis has been very costly in...

Study on sovereign bond market integration and the role of the euro, trading platforms and globalisation. We disentangle different driving factors of sovereign bond market integration by studying yield co-movements of EMU countries, the UK, the US and 16 German Lander in the last 15 years. At a...

We investigate the impact of EMU on macroeconomic volatility. The volatilities of inflation and nominal interest rates have declined, as has, more importantly, the volatility of real consumption growth. Since global volatility has fallen for reasons unrelated to EMU (the “great...