Even before the financial crisis of 2007/08, there were significant questions about Europe's long-term growth prospects. After a long period of catching up with US levels of labour productivity, euro area productivity growth had, from the mid-1990s onwards, fallen significantly behind. Using...

We study cross-country differences in monetary policy transmission across the large four euro-area countries (France, Germany, Italy and Spain) using a large Bayesian vector autoregressive model with endogenous prior selection. Drawing both on the posterior distributions of the cross-country...

We tackle two questions in this paper: In the sovereign debt crisis, what moves the euro area inflation outlook and has the firm anchoring of medium to long-term inflation expectations been touched? Deriving densities from a new data set on options on the euro area harmonized index of consumer...

Our paper studies the relationship between money growth and consumer price inflation in the euro area using wavelet analysis. Wavelet analysis allows to account for variations in the money growth-inflation relationship both across the frequency spectrum and across time. We find evidence of...

The likely substantial impact of Covid-19 related measures on the public finances of European countries has prompted an unprecedented call for new and significant policies at a European level to alleviate the pressures on individual member states. The administrative closures adopted across a...

We assess the macroeconomic effects of the Eurosystem's asset purchases on the four largest euro area economies using simulation exercises that combine unconventional monetary policy shocks with a fixed policy rate for the duration of the purchase programme. We identify unconventional monetary...

Data from member states' Stability and Convergence Programmes from 2011 to 2018 are used to assess the cyclicality of government consumption in the EU after the European Semester took effect. Econometric estimations, which address endogeneity issues, find the intended (ex-ante) fiscal policy to...

This paper considers whether Ireland's sovereign bonds have decoupled from other euro area sovereigns (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain - the "periphery") with whom it was categorised during the sovereign bond market crisis of the early 2010s. Having initially reviewed yield and sovereign...

We analyse the macroeconomic effects of exogenous contractions in bank lending to non-financial corporations in the Euro Area, Germany, France, Italy and Spain using a Bayesian vector autoregressive model with endogenous hyperparameter selection and identification via sign restrictions. We focus...

We study the cross-country dimension of financial cycles for six euro area countries using three different methodologies: principal component analysis, synchronicity and similarity measures and wavelet analysis. We find that equity prices and interest rates display synchronization across...