This paper examines the responses of private consumption, residential investment, and business investment in 11 EU countries, Japan, and the United States to shocks in housing and equity prices. The effects are assessed with a Structural Vector Auto Regressive (SVAR) model, and four key findings...

This paper explores the importance of housing and mortgage market heterogeneity in 12 European countries for the transmission of monetary policy. We use a panel VAR model which is estimated over the period 19952006 to generate impulse responses of key macroeconomic variables to a monetary policy...

In the current debate on the reasons and implications of the Greek and Irish euro crisis, the intra-European current account imbalances have gained rising attention. Whereas Greece and Ireland struggle for austerity in private and public spending, Germany is urged to reduce its current account...

Distance related variables typically vary in a cross-section dimension but less so in a time dimension across cities, regions, or countries. The enlargement of the EU or the introduction of the euro, however, can be looked upon as integration shocks that are informative of the consequences of...

It is widely argued that Europe's unified monetary policy calls for the international coordination at the fiscal level. We survey the issues involved with such coordination of fiscal policy as a demand management tool and we use a simple model to investigate the circumstances under which...

We estimate the effects of exogenous innovations to the balance sheet of the ECB since the start of the financial crisis within a structural VAR framework. An expansionary balance sheet shock stimulates bank lending, stabilizes financial markets, and has a positive impact on economic activity...

Using a rich data set on the EU regions, we analyze the relevance of two possible determinants of a region's resilience to shocks, the degree of urbanization and specialization. We take the Great Recession, the economic and financial crisis that started in 2008, as our shock and then analyze how...

This paper uses panel vector autoregressive models and simulations of an estimated DSGE model to explore the reaction of Euro area banks to the global financial crisis. We focus on their interest rate setting behavior in response to standard macroeconomic shocks. Our main empirical finding is...