In mid-September 2008, a global financial crisis erupted which was followed by the most serious worldwide economic recession for decades. As in many other regions of the world, governments in the euro area stepped in with a wide range of emergency measures to stabilise the financial sector and...

In this paper we take a systematic look at recent trends in global protectionism and at the potential implications of a protectionist backlash for economic growth, using results from the recent economic literature and new model simulations. We find that there has so far been a moderate increase...

The prolonged crisis exposed the vulnerability of a monetary union without a banking union. The Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM), which started operating in November 2014, is an essential step towards restoring banks to health and rebuilding trust in the banking system. The ECB is today...

We analyze the link between banking sector quality and sovereign risk in the whole European Union over 1999–2014. We employ four different indicators of sovereign risk (including market- and opinion-based assessments), a rich set of theoretically and empirically motivated banking sector...

The global financial and economic crisis – including two euro area recessions in 2008-2009 and 2011-2013 – has had a heavy impact on euro area labour markets. A notable feature throughout the crisis has been the considerable degree of cross-country heterogeneity of labour market adjustments...

We study the sensitivity of banks' credit supply to small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) in the UK to banks' financial condition before and during the financial crisis. Employing unique data on the geographical location of all bank branches in the UK, we connect firms' access to bank credit...

In this paper we suggest that Eurozone countries face a policy trade-off among: 1) a common rule imposing co-movements in fiscal policy; 2) financial stability; and 3) financial integration. We provide empirical evidence documenting the existence of such a trade-off in the period characterized...

German policy during the Eurozone crisis supposedly follows an ordoliberal tradition. In this paper, we discuss to what extent this contention holds and to what extent Germany pragmatically responded to different crisis phenomena. A proper analysis of ordoliberal thinking reveals that the...