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...

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...

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...

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 panel of euro area countries to assess the determinants of long-term sovereign bond yield spreads over the period 1999.01-2010.12. We find that, on top of the fundamentals themselves, changes in the sensitivity of bond prices to fundamentals are also necessary to explain yields over the...

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...

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...

This paper investigates whether output and inflation respond asymmetrically to credit shocks in the euro area. The methodology, based on a non-linear VAR system, follows work by Balke (2000) for the US. The results reveal evidence of threshold effects related to credit conditions in the economy....

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...