The pending enlargement of the European Monetary Union (EMU) has brought to the fore the discussion of the voting right distribution in the European Central Bank (ECB) council. We show that, in a model where labor unions internalize the inflationary consequences of wage setting, deviating from a...

Soon, euro area membership could more than double, with the vast majority of accession countries being quite different in economic terms compared with current members. Under the current decision-making system, this can lead to high decisionmaking costs and there is a risk that monetary policy...

The belief that the ECB follows the US Federal Reserve in setting its policy is so entrenched with market participants and commentators that the search for empirical support would seem to be a trivial task. However, this is not the case. We find that the ECB is indeed often influenced by the...

We assess the role of national fiscal policies, as automatic stabilizers, within a monetary union. We use a two-country New Keynesian DGE model which incorporates non-Ricardian consumers (as in Galì et al. 2004) and a home bias in the composition of national consumption bundles. We find that...

The paper discusses key elements of optimal central bank design and applies its findings to the Eurosystem. A particular focus is on the size of monetary policy committees, the degree of centralization, and the representation of relative economic size in the voting rights of regional (or...

We examine the role of money in the policies of the ECB, using introductory statements of the ECB President at the monthly press conferences during 1999-2004. Over time, the relative amount of words devoted to the monetary analysis has decreased. Our analysis of indicators of the monetary policy...

This paper reconsiders the narratives surrounding Japan's economic performance since the 1980s in relation to the experiences of the U.S. and the Eurozone. There are important differences between these three economies and some striking parallels. It is found that the poor reputation of the Bank...

Narratives that portray macroeconomic policies in Japan as unlike ones pursued in other large economies persist. I revisit how several factors, including monetary, fiscal, and demographic factors impact Japan, the US, and the euro area. Panel VARs driven by factors or observed macroeconomic...