In the revised monetary policy strategy of the European Central Bank (ECB), “price stability is best maintained by aiming for two per cent inflation over the medium term”, with “symmetric commitment” to this target. “Symmetry means that the Governing Council considers negative and...

Chinese currency policy has had a strong impact on the value of investors' portfolios in recent years. On August 11, 2015, the People's Bank of China announced a new exchange rate policy where the RMB central parity rate against the USD would be determined each morning by the previous day's...

In the struggle between the forces of free trade and the restrictive influence of insularism the latter recently seems to have the upper hand. This is illustrated by the referendum of June 23, 2016 where the United Kingdom (UK) voted to leave the European Union (EU). In this paper we evaluate...

Exploiting changes in the geography of economic integration in Europe, this paper uses detailed Exploiting changes in the geography of economic integration in Europe, we quantify the economic consequences of Brexit using a quantitative general equilibrium model that captures inter- and...

This paper examines the shortcomings in the UK government's Brexit negotiation strategy which reflected Prime Minister Theresa May's weak political leadership. The Prime Minister focused on securing the short-term political survival of her government amidst turbulent and fractious domestic...

The former EU president Jean-Claude Junker has proposed that all countries of the European Union should also adopt the euro as their currency and recent research has shown that countries currently pursuing this goal indeed fulfill the classical Optimal Currency Area (OCA) criterion of positively...

The Brexit vote precipitated the unravelling of the UK’s membership of the world’s deepest economic integration agreement. This paper reviews evidence on the realized economic effects of Brexit. The 2016 Brexit referendum changed expectations about future UK-EU relations. Studying its...

We explore the effects of the ECB's unconventional monetary policy on the banks' sovereign debt portfolios. In particular, using panel vector autoregressive (VAR) models we analyze whether banks increased their domestic government bond holdings in response to non-standard monetary policy shocks,...

We explore the reaction of the euro area periphery sovereigns' fiscal positions to an unconventional monetary policy shock. We estimate panel vector autoregressive (VAR) models over the period 2010-2018, and identify the shock by imposing sign restrictions. Our results suggest that the...