Low international competitiveness of a set of euro area countries, which have become evident by large current account deficits and rising risk premiums on government bonds, is one of the most challenging economic policy issues for Europe. We analyse the role of private restructuring and public...

In this paper we present an empirically stable euro area money demand model. Using a sample period until 2009:2 shows that the current financial and economic crisis that started in 2007 does not appear to have any noticeable impact on the stability of the euro area money demand function. We also...

The paper scrutinizes the role of wages and capital flows for competitiveness in the new EU member states in the context of real convergence. For this purpose it extends the seminal Balassa-Samuelson model by international capital markets. The augmented Balassa-Samuelson model is linked to the...

We analyze the ECB Governing Council's voting procedures. The literature has by now discussed numerous aspects of the rotation model but does not account for many institutional aspects of the voting procedure of the GC. Using the randomization scheme based on the multilinear extension (MLE) of...

In the debate on global imbalances, the euro area countries did not receive much attention so far. While the current account is on balance for the entire area, divergences between individual member states have increased since the introduction of the common currency. In this paper, the imbalances...

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...

We analyze the importance of global shocks for the global economy and national policy makers. More specifically, we investigate whether monetary policy has become less effective in the wake of financial globalization. We also examine whether there is increasing uncertainty for central banks due...

This paper examines the significance of different fundamental regimes by applying various monetary models of the exchange rate to one of the politically most important exchange rates, the exchange rate of the US dollar vis-à-vis the euro (the DM). We use monthly data from 1975:01 to 2007:12....

We assess the differences that emerge in Taylor rule estimations for the ECB when using ex-post data instead of real time forecasts and vice versa. We argue that previous comparative studies in this field mixed up two separate effects. First, the differences resulting from the use of ex-post and...

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...