The likely enlargement of euro-area membership will radically change the environment under which monetary policy will be made in the euro area. Within less than a decade, the number of member countries in the euro area could more than double, with the vast majority of accession countries being...

Global excess liquidity is sometimes believed to limit sovereign monetary policy even in large economies, including the euro area. There is much discussion about what constitutes global excess liquidity and our approach adjusts liquidity for longer-term interest rate and output effects. We find...

We use a mean-adjusted Bayesian VAR model as an out-of-sample forecasting tool to test whether money growth Granger-causes inflation in the euro area. Based on data from 1970 to 2006 and forecasting horizons of up to 12 quarters, there is surprisingly strong evidence that including money...

This paper contributes to the debate on the role of money in monetary policy by analyzing the information content of money in forecasting euro-area inflation. We compare the predictive performance within and among various classes of structural and empirical models in a consistent framework using...

When does trade become a one-way relationship? We study bilateral trade balances for a sample of 18 European countries over the period from 1948 through 2008. We find that, with the introduction of the euro, trade imbalances among euro area members widened considerably, even after allowing for...

Monetary policy in the euro area is conducted within a multicountry, multicultural, and multilingual context involving multiple central banking traditions. How does this heterogeneity affect the ability of economic agents to understand and to anticipate monetary policy by the European Central...

Monetary aggregates continue to play an important role in the ECB''s policy strategy. This paper revisits the case for money, surveying the ongoing theoretical and empirical debate. The key conclusion is that an exclusive focus on non-monetary factors alone may leave the ECB with an incomplete...

The natural interest rate is of great relevance to central banks, but it is difficult to measure. We show that in a standard microfounded monetary model, the natural interest rate co-moves with a transformation of the money demand that can be computed from actual data. The co-movement is of a...