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...

In this paper we assess to what extent in the existence of a financial crisis, government spending can contribute to mitigate economic downturns in the short run and whether such impact differs in crisis and non crisis times. We use panel analysis for a set of OECD and non-OECD countries for the...

The report on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress by Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi concludes that in the measurement of household welfare all material components should be covered, i.e. consumption, income and wealth, from both the micro as well as the macro perspective....

Since its creation the euro area suffered from imbalances between its core and peripheral members. This paper checks whether macroprudential policy tools - applied in a countercyclical fashion as known from the DSGE literature to the peripheral countries - could contribute to providing more...

We assess the yield impact of asset purchases within the ECB's Securities Markets Programme in five euro area sovereign bond markets during 2010-11. Identification is non-trivial and based on time series panel data regression on predetermined purchases and control covariates. In addition to...

This paper studies unemployment and vacancy developments in the euro area at the aggregate and country level over the Great Recession. The recent crisis has had a heterogeneous impact on euro area labour markets, leading to significant employment losses, especially in some sectors. The extent to...

The goal of this paper is to analyze predictability of future asset returns in the context of model uncertainty. Using data for the euro area, the US and the UK, we show that one can improve the forecasts of stock returns using a model averaging approach, and there is a large amount of model...

In a panel data framework applied to Portfolio Distance-to-Default series of corporate sectors in the euro area, this paper evaluates systemic and idiosyncratic determinants of default risk and examines how distress is transferred in and between the financial and corporate sectors since the...

This paper is an event study focusing on the global effects of the euro debt crisis in 2010-2013. After identifying 18 key exogenous crisis events, I analyze the impact on equity returns, exchange rates and government bond yields in 12 advanced and 13 emerging countries. The main effect of euro...