This paper examines the link between health indicators, environmental variables and economic development, and the consequences of this relationship on economic convergence for a large sample of rich and poor countries. While in economic literature income and environment are seen to have an...

This paper provides evidence that the European Central Bank (ECB) has adjusted its interest rate since 1999 nonlinearly according to the macroeconomic and financial environment in the euro zone. Its policy function is described by a Taylor rule with regime shifts implying that the stance of...

Business surveys are an important element in the analysis of the short-term economic situation because of the timeliness and nature of the information they convey. Especially, surveys are often involved in econometric models in order to provide an early assessment of the current state of the...

This paper presents an overview of the results of a research project on monetary transmission pursued by the Eurosystem, which has analysed micro data on firms and banks in several countries of the euro area in great detail. There is strong empirical support for an interest rate channel working...

We build a two-country open-economy monetary union DSGE model in order to explain some macroeconomic imbalances in the euro area. We fo cus on the role of cyclic al behaviour of public spending and sovereign risk premium. Pro-cyclical primary public expenditures in one country do not lead to...

The aim of this article is to analyze how financial heterogeneity can accentuate the cyclical divergences inside a monetary union that faces technological, monetary and financial shocks. To this purpose, this study relies on a two-country Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model, where the...

In this paper, we set up and test a model of the Euro zone, with a special emphasis on the role of money. The model follows the New Keynesian DSGE framework, money being introduced in the utility function with a non-separability assumption. By using Bayesian estimation techniques, we shed light...