At the beginning of 1999 the euro was launched as a common currency in 11 European countries. This paper addresses empirically the medium to long-term forces driving the real euro-dollar exchange rate. Constructing a synthetic euro-dollar exchange rate over a period from 1975 to 1998 and...

The first part of this paper outlines the concept of democratic accountability of central banks, and compares the legal accountability of the ECB with some other central banks (Bank of Canada, Bank of Japan, Bank of England and the Federal Reserve System). In the second part, we present a theory...

The present paper uses survey data on expected consumer price developments to analyse the role of inflation expectations in the inflation process. The survey measures of price expectations are derived from the European Commission's Consumer Survey and from the surveys of professional experts...

This paper offers a comprehensive comparison of the structure of banking and financial markets in the euro area. Based on this, several hypotheses about the role of banks in monetary policy transmission are developed. Many of the predictions that have been proposed for the U.S. are deemed...

The canonical New Keynesian model specifies inflation as the present-value of future real marginal cost. This paper tests this New Keynesian Phillips Curve and exploits projections of future real marginal cost generated by VAR models to assess the model’s ability to match the behavior of...

Fiscal rules, such as the excessive deficit procedure and the stability and growth pact (SGP), aim at constraining government behavior. Milesi-Ferretti (2003) develops a model in which governments circumvent such rules by reverting to creative accounting. The amount of this creative accounting...

In this paper we rely on techniques recently developed by Bai and Ng (2004a) to estimate common euro-area stationary and non-stationary factors using a large-scale dynamic factor model. We find that euro-area economies share four non-stationary factors or trends and one stationary factor. By...

In this paper we examine the sustainability of euro area public finances against the backdrop of population ageing. We critically assess the widely used projections of the Working Group on Ageing Populations (AWG) of the EU's Economic Policy Committee and argue that ageing costs may be higher...