Europe's monetary union is part of a broader process of integration that started in the aftermath of World War II. In this "political guide for economists" we look at the creation of the euro within the bigger picture of European integration. How and why were European institutions established?...

We provide evidence on the fit of the hybrid New Keynesian Phillips curve for selected euro zone countries, the US and the UK. Instead of imposing rational expectations and estimating the Phillips curve by the Generalized Method of Moments, we follow Roberts (1997) and Adam and Padula (2003) and...

In this paper we model the volatility of the spread between the overnight interest rate and the central bank policy rate (the policy spread) for the euro area and the UK during the two main phases of the financial crisis that began in late 2007. During the crisis, the policy spread exhibited...

We analyze the effects of the increasingly expansionary monetary policies on the economic order and on the European integration process. We argue that the market orders shaped in postwar Germany and in Margret Thatcher's United Kingdom have long served as cornerstones for growth, prosperity and...

This paper analyses the persistence and mean reversion properties of sovereign debt and its components by applying fractional integration methods to long runs of annual data starting in 1831 for the UK and the US, in 1862 for Italy and in 1881 for France and Germany, and ending in all cases in...

This paper unveils a new resource for macroeconomic research: a long-run dataset covering disaggregated bank credit for 17 advanced economies since 1870. The new data show that the share of mortgages on banks’ balance sheets doubled in the course of the 20th century, driven by a sharp rise of...

Using firm-level data for the UK, we investigate the link between firms ́financial health, borrowing ratio and export exit, paying special attention to the recent financial crisis. Our results show that deterioration in the financial position of firms has increased the hazard of export exit...

This paper builds on the discussion paper published by HM Treasury in 2003 alongside the UK Governments̕ assessment of the case for EMU entry. The paper considers the potential for fiscal policy to play a greater role in stabilisation policy if the UK were inside EMU. The paper considers: the...

This paper attempts to provide a conceptual framework for the analysis of counterfactual scenarios using macroeconometric models. As an application we consider UK entry to the euro. Entry involves a long-term commitment to restrict UK nominal exchange rates and interest rates to be the same as...