We assess the sustainability of public finances in the EU15 over the period 1970-2006 using stationarity and cointegration analysis. Specifically, we use panel unit root tests of the first and second generation allowing in some cases for structural breaks. We also apply modern panel...

We document that there are strong complementarities between monetary policy and macroprudential policy in shaping the evolution of bank credit. We use a unique loanlevel dataset comprising multiple credit registers from several European countries and different types of loans, including corporate...

We establish basic facts about the external finance premium. Tens of millions of individual loan contracts extended to euro area firms allow studying the determinants of the external finance premium at the country, bank, firm, and contract levels of disaggregation. At the country level, the...

We analyse the impact of standard and non-standard monetary policy measures on bank profitability. For empirical identification, the analysis focuses on the euro area, thereby exploiting substantial bank and country heterogeneity within a monetary union where the central bank has implemented a...

The 20th anniversary of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) offers an opportunity to look back on the ECB's record and learn lessons that can improve the conduct of policy in the future. This paper charts the way the ECB has defined, interpreted and applied its monetary policy framework - its...

We analyse the effects of supranational versus national banking supervision on credit supply, and its interactions with monetary policy. For identification, we exploit: (i) a new, proprietary dataset based on 15 European credit registers; (ii) the institutional change leading to the...

In this paper we provide a positive exercise on past business-cycle correlations and risk sharing in the European Union, and on the ability of insurance mechanisms and fiscal policies to smooth income fluctuations. The results suggest in particular that while some of the new Member States have...