European banks have been criticized for holding excessive domestic government debt during the recent Eurozone crisis, which may have intensified the diabolic loop between sovereign and bank credit risks. By using a novel bank-level dataset covering the entire timeline of the Eurozone crisis, I...

We use a unique case study to estimate the effect of withdrawing from a free trade agreement on international trade. Lately, the political opposition to international economic cooperation has been on the rise, but little is known about how the withdrawal from a trade agreement affects trade. We...

This paper analyses the smoothing of asymmetric shocks to output for a sample of OECD countries. It also examines whether the private capital markets will be able to replace the government in providing output smoothing in the euro-area, in the near future. The research finds no evidence of large...

The main aim of this paper is to examine the exchange rate behavior of a group of four transitional, EU accession countries, with a view to making policy recommendations regarding their accession to full European Monetary Union. We employ a dynamic OLS panel estimator to investigate the relative...

According to the traditional 'optimum currency area' approach, not much will be lost from a very hard peg to a currency union if there has been little reason for variations in the exchange rate. This paper takes a different approach and highlights the fact that high exchange rate volatility may...

We analyze the impact of Eurozone/Germany and U.S. macroeconomic news announcements and the communication of the monetary policy settings of the ECB and the Fed on the forex markets of new EU members. We employ an event study methodology to analyze intra-day data from 2011-2015. Our...

This paper addresses two main questions: (a) Has European integration hindered the implementation of labour, financial and product market structural reforms? (b) Do the effects of these reforms vary more across sectors than across countries? Using more granular reform measures, longer time...