This report discusses the role of the European Union’s full employment objective in the conduct of the ECB’s monetary policy. It first reviews a range of indicators of full employment, highlights the heterogeneity of labour market outcomes within different groups in the population and across...

The ECB’s price stability mandate has been defined by the Treaty. But the Treaty has not spelled out what price stability precisely means. To make the mandate operational, the Governing Council has provided a quantitative definition in 1998 and a clarification in 2003. The landscape has...

This paper analyses the implications of climate change for the conduct of monetary policy in the euro area. It first investigates macroeconomic and financial risks stemming from climate change and from policies aimed at climate mitigation and adaptation, as well as the regulatory and fiscal...

This paper summarises the findings of the Eurosystem’s Expert Group on Inflation Expectations (EGIE), which was one of the 13 work streams conducting analysis that fed into the ECB’s monetary policy strategy review. The EGIE was tasked with (i) reviewing the nature and behaviour of inflation...

The onset of the financial crisis in 2008 has highlighted the problems of diverging external imbalances within Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the role of persistent losses in competitiveness. This paper starts by investigating some of the competitiveness factors which contributed to...

The last review of the ECB’s monetary policy strategy in 2003 followed a period of predominantly upside risks to price stability. Experience following the 2008 financial crisis has focused renewed attention on the question of how monetary and fiscal policy should best interact, in particular...

The article analyses recent developments in business investment for a large group of EU countries, using a broad set of analytical tools and data sources. We find that the assessment of whether or not investment is currently low varies across benchmarks and countries. At the euro area level and...

The article analyses recent developments in business investment for a large group of EU countries, using a broad set of analytical tools and data sources. We find that the assessment of whether or not investment is currently low varies across benchmarks and countries. At the euro area level and...

This paper analyses the challenges that high public debt and ageing populations pose to medium-term growth. First, macroeconometric model simulations suggest that medium-term growth can benefit from credible fiscal consolidation, partly through reductions in sovereign risk premia. Second, a...

This paper applies the semi-structural model proposed by Bernanke and Blanchard (2023) to analyse wage growth, price inflation and inflation expectations in the euro area. It is part of a broader project coordinated by Bernanke and Blanchard to provide a unified framework for analysing and...