In recent years, fiscal performance in Central Europe has steadily deteriorated, in contrast to the improvement in the Baltics. This paper explores the determinants of such differences among countries slated for EU accession. Regression estimates suggest that economic and institutional...

Global excess liquidity is sometimes believed to limit sovereign monetary policy even in large economies, including the euro area. There is much discussion about what constitutes global excess liquidity and our approach adjusts liquidity for longer-term interest rate and output effects. We find...

This paper contributes to the debate on the role of money in monetary policy by analyzing the information content of money in forecasting euro-area inflation. We compare the predictive performance within and among various classes of structural and empirical models in a consistent framework using...

Contents -- I. Introduction -- II. A Brief Guide Monetary Analysis in the ECB's Strategy and Its Evolution Since 1998 -- III. Survey of the Theoretical Debate -- IV. The Importance of Money for Inflation Forecasts -- V. Disaggregated Monetary Analysis -- VI. How Time Path Dependent Should the...