This paper questions the impact of trade integration on business cycle sychronization in the EMU by distinguishing increase of existing trade flows (the intensive margin) and creation of new trade flows (the extensive margin). Using a DSGE model, we find that synchronization is weakened when new...

Since January 2008, the Euro Area has enlarged for the third time to Cyprus and Malta. As Slovakia is now planned to join in 2009, these waves of new entries revive the debate around greater asymmetries which may threaten the stability of the whole monetary union. This paper extends Bayoumi and...

I extend the Bayoumi-Eichengreen (1993) approach by extracting new information from a scatter plot of correlation coefficients between shocks in order to better visualize how far a given country is from a monetary union. Indexes of distance and relative strength can be derived from either a...

This article compares reactions of economies in Economic Monetary Union to a single monetary policy. For that, we estimate a reaction function supposed to represent the behaviour of European Central Bank over the period 1980-1998. Then residuals are introduced into the production equation of...

Depuis le 1er janvier 2001, douze pays participent à l'UEM. L'instauration de la monnaie unique constitue l'aboutissement d'un long processus de convergence. Le Système Monétaire Européen créé en 1979 visait déjà à établir une coopération monétaire plus étroite. Ensuite, les trois...

This article focuses on the comparison of sacrifice ratios as an indicator for structural dispersion within the euro area over the period 1972-2003. Estimates of the sacrifice ratio, defined as the cumulative output cost arising from permanent inflation reduction, are obtained using structural...