We assess the sustainability of public finances in the EU15 over the period 1970-2006 using stationarity and cointegration analysis. Specifically, we use panel unit root tests of the first and second generation allowing in some cases for structural breaks. We also apply modern panel...

The financial crisis clearly illuminated the potential amplifying role of financial factors on macroeconomic developments. Indeed, the heavy impairments of banks' balance sheets brought to the fore the banking sector's ability to provide a smooth flow of credit to the real economy. However, most...

We analyse the interaction between monetary and macroprudential policies in the euro area by means of a two-country DSGE model with financial frictions and cross-border spillover effects. We calibrate the model for the four largest euro area countries (i.e. Germany, France, Italy, and Spain),...

Should monetary policy lean against financial stability risks? This has been a subject of fierce debate over the last decades. We contribute to the debate about “leaning against the wind” (LAW) along three lines. First, we evaluate the cost and benefits of LAW using the Svensson (2017)...

We investigate the effect of sovereign stress and of unconventional monetary policy on small firms' financing patterns during the euro area debt crisis. We find that after the crisis started, firms in stressed countries were more likely to be credit rationed, both in the quantity and in the...

We use a large database of more than 685,000 European firms to show that financial flexibility attained through conservative leverage policies is more important for private, small, medium-sized and young firms and for firms in countries with lower access to credit and weaker investor protection....

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...

The present paper investigates the pass-through between market interest rates and bank interest rates in the euro area. Compared to the large interest rate pass-through literature the paper mainly improves upon two points. First, a novel data set, partially based on new harmonised ECB bank...

Monetary policy aims at affecting corporate borrowing by influencing the marginal costs of firms, but its potency can be conditioned by the degree of market competition. We first identify conditions under which changes in marginal costs may have different effects on credit constraints and output...

We compute average mark-ups as a measure of market power throughout time and study their interaction with fiscal policy and macroeconomic variables in a VAR framework. From impulse-response functions the results, with annual data for a set of 14 OECD countries covering the period 1970-2007, show...