The recent extensive package introduced by the Commission is the most comprehensive reinforcement of economic governance in the EU and the euro area since the launch of the Economic and Monetary Union. Broader and enhanced surveillance of fiscal policies, but also macroeconomic policies and...

The current instruments in the EU to deal with debt and liquidity crises include among others the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism (EFSM). Both are temporary in nature (3 years). In terms of an efficient future crisis management...

We develop a roadmap of how the ECB should further reduce the volume of money (money supply) and roll back credit easing in order to prevent inflation. The exits should be step-by-step rather than one-off. Communicating about the exit strategy must be an integral part of the exit strategy. Price...

This paper examines the contemporaneous relationship between the exchange rate regime and structural economic reforms for a sample of CEEC/CIS transition countries. We investigate empirically whether structural reforms are complements or substitutes for monetary commitment in the attempt to...

The ECB has accepted increasing amounts of rubbish collateral since the crisis started leading to exposure to serious private sector credit risk (i.e. default risk) on its collateralised lending and reverse operations (repo). This has led some commentators to argue that the ECB needs fiscal...

After the dramatic rescue package for the euro area, the governing council of the European Central Bank decided to purchase European government bonds - to ensure an orderly monetary policy transmission mechanism. Many observers argued that, by bond purchases, national fiscal policies could from...

This paper deals with the impact of the $/¿ exchange rate on German exports in the period from 1995Q1 to 2008Q4. Our main aim is to identify pain thresholds for German exporters. We rely on a non-linear model according to which suddenly strong spurts of exports occur when changes of the EXR go...

A non-linear model is applied where suddenly strong spurts of exports occur when changes of the exchange rate go beyond a zone of inaction. We call the latter a play area - analogous to mechanical play and implement an algorithm describing path-dependent playhysteresis into a regression...

This study is motivated by the development of credit-related instruments and signals of stock price movements of large banks during the recent financial crisis. What is common to most of the empirical studies in this field is that they concentrate on modeling the conditional mean. However,...

This paper examines whether government ideology has influenced monetary policy in OECD countries. We use quarterly data in the 1980.1-2005.4 period and exclude EMU countries. Our Taylor-rule specification focuses on the interactions of a new time-variant index of central bank independence with...