Securitization is considered to be one of the biggest financial innovations of the last century. It is also regarded as both a catalyst and solution to the 2008 financial crisis. Once a popular method of financing the mortgage and consumer credit markets, aspects of the global securitization...

To study whether banks retain their lessons from the experience of a severe financial crisis, we examine the effects of the systemic banking crisis of the early 1990s in three Nordic countries (Finland, Norway, and Sweden). While this crisis largely bypassed the rest of Europe, we hypothesize...

This paper tests for the existence of market power in banking, using data on demand deposit rates of households and corresponding market rates in five euro area countries. An implicit measure for market power is based on a partial adjustment model that also allows for an asymmetric response of...

The present crisis has revealed that, as expected, much of the safety net for handling failures in the banking system is deficient, particularly for cross-border banks, and the present problems had to be handled by a range of ad hoc measures. The principal new measure that needs to be undertaken...

In this study, we test whether regional growth in 11 European countries depends on financial development and suggest the use of cost- and profit-efficiency estimates as quality measures for financial institutions. Contrary to the usual quantitative proxies for financial development, the quality...

This paper investigates the extent to which euro area monetary policy has responded to evolving economic conditions in individual member states as opposed to the euro area as a whole. Based on a forward-looking Taylor rule-type policy reaction function, we conduct counterfactual exercises that...

This paper examines euro area inflation dynamics by estimating open economy New Keynesian Phillips curves based on the assumption that all imports are intermediate goods. Instead of imposing rational expectations a priori, Consensus Economics survey data and OECD inflation forecasts are used to...

This paper analyses the international transmission of monetary policy in a case where all export prices are set in US dollars. 'Dollar pricing' implies that the international effects of US monetary shocks are different to those of European shocks because of asymmetric exchange rate pass-through...

Evidence suggests that after a period of convergence in the early and mid-1990s, the euro area economies may have started diverging. As a consequence, the common monetary policy could become well-suited for a number of countries. This paper studies the extent and severity of the recent...