Microfoundations of the euro's effect on euro area trade hinge on the timing, the speed and the size of adjustment in trade costs. We estimate timing, speed and size of adjustment in trade costs for sectoral trade data. Our approach allows for sector specific impacts of trade costs on sectoral...

Optimum Currency Area (OCA) theory proves inadequate in the analysis of the new regional monetary integration schemes that have sprung up among developing and emerging market economies since the 1990s. Building on the concept of 'original sin' developed by Eichengreen et al. we argue that a...

The likely extension of the euro area has triggered a debate on the organization of the ECB, in particular on the apparent mismatch between relative economic size and voting rights in the Council. We present a simple model of optimal representation in a federal central bank addressing this...

We develop a simple model that looks at the incentives of private banks to behave prudentially and undertake costly efforts to lower the probability of bankruptcy or having to be bailed out by a lender of last resort. Government regulators can force banks to increase efforts beyond the privately...

Global excess liquidity roaming the world's financial markets (or its sudden absence) is sometimes believed to limit sovereign monetary policy even in large economies such as the euro area. However, there is still discussion about what constitutes global excess liquidity and how exactly it...

Controllability of longer-term interest rates requires that the persistence of their deviations from the central bank's policy rate (i.e. the policy spreads) remains sufficiently low. This paper applies fractional integration techniques to assess the persistence of policy spreads of euro area...

The pending enlargement of the European Monetary Union (EMU) has brought to the fore the discussion of the voting right distribution in the European Central Bank (ECB) council. We show that, in a model where labor unions internalize the inflationary consequences of wage setting, deviating from a...