The recent increase of interest rate spreads in Europe and their apparent detachment from underlying fundamental variables has generated a debate on multiple equilibria in the sovereign bond market (see De Grauwe and Ji (2012)). We critically evaluate this hypothesis, by pointing towards an...

The transition process in Central and Eastern Europe was associated with growing environmental awareness. This paper analyses the determinants of Pollution Abatement and Control Expenditure (PACE) at plant level in the case of Romania using survey data and a Multilevel Regression Model (MRM)....

Central bank credit has expanded dramatically in some of the euro area member countries since the beginning of the financial crisis. This paper makes two contributions to understand this stylized fact. First, we discuss a simple model of monetary policy that includes (i) a credit channel and...

The Single Supervisory Mechanism was introduced to eliminate the common-pool problem and limit uncontrolled lending by national central banks (NCBs). We analyze its effectiveness. Second, we model how, by forbearing and providing refinancing credit, NCBs avoid domestic resolution costs and,...

The expansion of regionalism has spawned an extensive theoretical literature analysing the effects of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) on trade flows. In this paper we focus on FTAs (also called European agreements) between the European Union (EU-15) and the Central and Eastern European countries...

In the winter 2011/12 a wave of internal capital flight prompted the ECB to abandon its exit strategy and to announce an unprecedented monetary expansion. We analyze this episode in several dimensions: (i) by providing an event-study analysis covering key variables from national central banks'...

This paper analyses the trade balance effects of Europe agreements (EA) between the EU-15 and four new EU members from Central and Eastern Europe (CEEC-4) using both static and dynamic panel data approaches. Specifically, the system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM, Blundell and Bond, 1998)...

According to the pollution haven hypotheses differences in environmental regulation affect trade flows and plant location. Specifically, environmental stringency should decrease exports and increase imports of 'dirty' goods. This paper estimates a gravity model to establish whether the...