The paper looks at the determinants of fiscal adjustments as reflected in the primary surplus of countries. Our conjecture is that governments will usually find it more attractive to pursue fiscal adjustments in a situation of relatively high growth, but based on a simple stylized model of...

The paper uses fiscal reaction functions for a panel of euro-area countries to investigate whether euro membership has reduced the responsiveness of countries to shocks in the level of inherited debt compared to the period prior to succession to the euro. While we find some evidence for such a...

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...

Recent articles suggest that a Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) with shrinkage is a good forecast device even when the number of variables is large. In this paper we evaluate different variants of the BVAR with respect to their forecast accuracy for euro area real GDP growth and HICP...

In this paper we estimate disaggregated labour demand equations using panel data involving observations across time (1970 - 2007) for twenty-three industries across eleven euro area countries. By using the EU KLEMS database, which provides data across countries, we provide industry-by-industry...

Despite large automatic stabilizers, the performance of the Euro area as a whole in terms of fiscal stabilization is relatively poor. This report argues that a meaningful fiscal stance for the Euro area should rely on the current account as a complement to the output gap, and be coordinated only...

The pending enlargement of the European Monetary Union (EMU) has brought to the fore the discussion of the voting right distribution in the European Central Bank (ECB) council. We show that, in a model where labor unions internalize the inflationary consequences of wage setting, deviating from a...

Using the measures proposed by Mink et al. (2012), we reexamine the coherence of business cycles in the euro area using a long sample period. We also analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on business cycle coherence and examine whether our measures for business cycle coherence indicate a...

Using a difference-in-differences identification strategy on a micro panel at the bank and firm level, we study the transmission effectiveness of ECB’s large-scale asset purchasing programs programs (i.e. APP and PEPP) in the Euro area. Our findings show: first, balance sheet composition of...

We explore how changes in capital-based macroprudential regulation in the euro area affect the exposure of national banking sectors to domestic government debt, thus strengthening or weakening the sovereign-bank nexus. To do so, we construct a measure of macroprudential policy based on the...