Current developments in Greece make clear that the rules of the European Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) were neither strict enough nor enforced strictly enough. To deal with the ongoing exit from the fiscal crisis and its related phenomena, we propose a new framework for fiscal policy...

This paper sheds new light on the information content of monetary and credit aggregates for future price developments in the euro area. Overall, we find strong variation in the information content of these variables over time. We show that monetary and credit aggregates are very often selected...

We study the properties of the IMF-WEO estimates of real-time output gaps for countries in the euro area as well as the determinants of their revisions over 1994-2017. The analysis shows that staff typically saw economies as operating below their potential. In real time, output gaps tend to have...

This paper examines the drivers, and reestimates the size of shadow economies in Europe, with a focus on the emerging economies, and recommends policies to increase formality. The size of shadow economies declined across Europe in recent years but remains significant, especially in Eastern...

This paper assesses the role of the housing market in the transmission of conventional and unconventional monetary policy across euro area regions. By exploiting a novel regional dataset on housing-related variables, a structural panel VAR analysis shows that monetary policy propagates...

This study identifies differences in the monetary policy transmission mechanism across the countries in the euro area. It is argued that part of the differences in the response of economic activity to monetary policy during the pre-EMU period, found in other studies, reflected differences in...