Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has transformed Europe and has created an integrated pan-European economy. Much research has focused on understanding this integration process and what benefits and costs it entails. This paper identifies a political economy channel of EMU as the monetary union...

There is a broad consensus that the quality of the political system and its institutions are fundamental for a country's prosperity. The paper focuses on political events in Italy over the past 35 years and asks whether the adoption of the euro in 1999 has helped insulate Italy's financial...

We estimate the shoe-leather costs of inflation in the euro area using monetary data adjusted for holdings of euro banknotes abroad. While we find evidence of marginally negative shoe-leather costs for very low levels of the nominal interest rate, our estimates suggest that the shoe-leather...

We use a unique dataset of ratings for euro area corporate loans from commercial banks’ internal rating-based (IRBs) systems and central banks’ in-house credit assessment systems (ICASs) to investigate whether banks’ IRB ratings underestimate the credit risk of their corporate loan...

The paper analyses the drivers of sovereign risk for 31 advanced and emerging economies during the European sovereign debt crisis. It shows that a deterioration in countries' fundamentals and fundamentals contagion – a sharp rise in the sensitivity of financial markets to fundamentals – are...

This paper tests whether the proposition that globalisation has led to greater sensitivity of domestic inflation to the global output gap (the quot;global output gap hypothesisquot;) holds for the euro area. The empirical analysis uses quarterly data over the period 1979-2003. Measures of the...

This paper investigates possible non-linearities in the dynamics of the euro area demand for the narrow aggregate M1. A long-run money demand relationship is firstly estimated over a sample period covering the last three decades. While the parameters of the relationship are jointly stable, there...

Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has transformed Europe and has created an integrated pan-European economy. Much research has focused on understanding this integration process and what benefits and costs it entails. This paper identifies a political economy channel of EMU as the monetary union...

Do negative policy rates hinder banks' transmission of monetary policy? To answer this question, we examine the behaviour of Italian mortgage lenders using a novel loan-level dataset. When policy rates turn negative, banks with higher ratios of retail overnight deposits to total assets charge...

The paper assesses the extent to which the Group of Seven (G7) has been successful in its management of major currencies since the 1970s. Using an event-study approach, the paper finds evidence that the G7 has been overall effective in moving the US dollar, yen and euro in the intended direction...