Since the negotiation of the Maastricht Treaty in December 1991 expectations on the new European currency could possibly influence European interest rates. The focus of this paper is both on the theoretical and empirical analysis of the link between European Monetary Union (EMU) and German...

We use event study regressions to compare the impact of EU monetary versus fiscal policy announcements on government bond spreads of ten euro member countries. Our motivation is to evaluate which of the two players - the ECB or the EU fiscal level - has been more crucial for the stabilization of...

Lending and borrowing interest rates are often slow to adjust to changing capital market conditions. This paper argues that national differences of the pass-through speed in the EU can be regarded as a retail-oriented indicator of financial integration. Based on an ECB database the speed of...