The euro-area sovereign debt crisis was characterized by feedback loops between (1) sovereign bond ratings and sovereign spreads in single jurisdictions and (2) sovereign spreads and ratings among jurisdictions. One explanation of this circumstance is that the ECB was unable to perform the role...

Fiscal fragility can undermine a government’s ability to honor its bank deposit insurance pledge and induces a positive correlation between sovereign default risk and financial (bank) default risk. We show that this positive relation is reversed if bank capital requirements in fiscally weak...

The relationship between exchange-rate volatility and aggregate export volumes for 12 industrial economies is examined using a model that includes real export earnings of oil-producing economies as a determinant of industrial-country export volumes. A supposition underlying the model is that,...

This paper, drawing on the lessons from the sovereign debt crisis, tries to give answers to some key questions: Was the strategy and specific actions to cope with the crisis appropriate? Was the priority given to preserving financial stability justified? Are stability and growth objectives...

This paper examines exchange-rate and price-level data for the long period 1590-2009 for the Netherlands and the United Kingdom (earlier the Dutch Republic and England), countries that at various times over this near four century span have differed substantially in terms of the pace at which...

On February 24-25, 2006 an international workshop on “Regional and International Currency Arrangements” was held in Vienna. It was co-sponsored by the Oesterreichische Nationalbank and the Bank of Greece, and jointly organized by Eduard Hochreiter and George Tavlas. Academic economists and...

We examine the impact of the ECB’s Securities Market Program (SMP) and the ECB’s two Covered Bond Purchase Programs (CBPPs) on sovereign bond spreads and covered-bond prices, respectively, for five euro-area stressed countries -- Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Our data are...

The main goal of this paper is to trace the long record of financial crises and financial market regulation from the perspective of an emerging economy. Two questions are addressed: first, what explains the incidence and severity of financial crises in an emerging market economy? And, second,...