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...

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...

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...

Media coverage of monetary policy actions is a central channel of a central bank's communication with the wider public, and thus an important factor for its credibility and policy effectiveness. This paper analyses the coverage which ECB monetary policy decisions receive in the print media, and...

Monetary policy in the euro area is conducted within a multi-country, multicultural, and multi-lingual context involving multiple central banking traditions. How does this heterogeneity affect the ability of economic agents to understand and to anticipate monetary policy by the ECB? Using a...

Am 11. und 12. Juni 2013 hat das Bundesverfassungsgericht Experten zur Krisenpolitik der EZB angehört. Dabei ging es um die Frage, ob oder inwieweit die EZB durch das Outright-Monetary-Transactions-Programm (OMT) Kompetenzen beansprucht, die ihr nicht übertragen worden sind. Wir...

In December 2013 agreement on the second pillar of the banking union was reached. The SRM sets up restructuring guidelines for banks, including a bank-paid resolution fund, fully operational in 2025. In the article we discuss how the current design of the banking union falls short of the goal of...

The paper presents a framework for analyzing the degree of financial transmission between money, bond and equity markets and exchange rates within and between the United States and the euro area. We find that asset prices react strongest to other domestic asset price shocks, and that there are...

The paper assesses the communication strategies of the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank and their effectiveness. We find that the effectiveness of communication is not independent from the decisionmaking process in the committee. The paper shows that the Federal...