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...

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),...

The move to monetary union in Europe led to convergence of interest rates among the participating countries. This was associated with notable cross-country differences in the behaviour of key macroeconomic aggregates. Compared to the low interest rate countries, former high interest rate...

This paper develops a tractable model of a monetary union with a sound fiscal governance structure and shows how in such environment the design of monetary policy above and at the lower bound constraint on short-term interest rates can be linked to well-known findings from the literature dealing...

We use a joint model of macroeconomic and term structure dynamics to estimate inflation risk premia in the United States and the euro area. To sharpen our estimation, we include in the information set macro data and survey data on inflation and interest rate expectations at various future...

We propose a new method for medium-term forecasting using exogenous information. We first show how a shifting-mean autoregressive model can be used to describe characteristic features in inflation series. This implies that we decompose the inflation process into a slowly moving nonstationary...

This paper explores the role that inflation forecasts play in the uncertainty surrounding the estimated effects of alternative monetary rules on unemployment dynamics in the euro area and the US. We use the inflation forecasts of 8 competing models in a standard Bayesian VAR to analyse the size...

As the role of central banks expanded, demand for public scrutiny of their actions increased. This paper investigates whether parliamentary hearings, the main tool to hold central banks accountable, are fit for this purpose. Using text analysis, it detects the topics and sentiments in...

This paper describes the response of three central banks to the 2007-09 financial crisis: the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England. In particular, the paper discusses the design, implementation and impact of so-called "non-standard" monetary policy measures focusing...

This paper estimates a time-varying AR-GARCH model of inflation producing measures of inflation uncertainty for the euro area, and investigates their linkages in a VAR framework, also allowing for the possible impact of the policy regime change associated with the start of EMU in 1999. The main...