Inflation expectations are a key determinant of actual and future inflation and thus matter for the conduct of monetary policy. We study how firms form their inflation expectations using quarterly firm-level data from the Bank of Canada's Business Outlook Survey, spanning the 2001 to 2015...

In this paper we provide a positive exercise on past business-cycle correlations and risk sharing in the European Union, and on the ability of insurance mechanisms and fiscal policies to smooth income fluctuations. The results suggest in particular that while some of the new Member States have...

In this paper we assess to what extent in the existence of a financial crisis, government spending can contribute to mitigate economic downturns in the short run and whether such impact differs in crisis and non crisis times. We use panel analysis for a set of OECD and non-OECD countries for the...

Low international competitiveness of a set of euro area countries, which have become evident by large current account deficits and rising risk premiums on government bonds, is one of the most challenging economic policy issues for Europe. We analyse the role of private restructuring and public...

This paper focuses on the relation between external imbalances and domestic money and credit growth in the euro area. We compute money and credit overhang both for the euro area as a whole and for individual member countries. Our results show that both aggregate money and credit overhang have...

We analyze the similarities and the differences in the fragility of the European Monetary system (EMS) and the Eurozone. We test the hypothesis that in the EMS the fragility arose from the absence of a credible lender of last resort in the foreign exchange markets while in the Eurozone it was...

The report on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress by Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi concludes that in the measurement of household welfare all material components should be covered, i.e. consumption, income and wealth, from both the micro as well as the macro perspective....

Since its creation the euro area suffered from imbalances between its core and peripheral members. This paper checks whether macroprudential policy tools - applied in a countercyclical fashion as known from the DSGE literature to the peripheral countries - could contribute to providing more...

We assess the yield impact of asset purchases within the ECB's Securities Markets Programme in five euro area sovereign bond markets during 2010-11. Identification is non-trivial and based on time series panel data regression on predetermined purchases and control covariates. In addition to...