This study assesses the experience of the Common Monetary Area (CMA) based on available empirical evidence over the last two decades. It pays particular attention to member countries'' adjustment to economic shocks in recent years and the inter-country linkages, including the spillover effects...

This paper considers the consequences of international financial market integration for national fiscal and monetary policies that derive from the absence of an international sovereign authority to define and enforce contractual obligations across borders. The sovereign immunity of national...

We reconsider the design of welfare-optimal monetary policy when financing frictions impair the supply of bank credit, and when the objectives set for monetary policy must be simple enough to be implementable and allow for effective accountability. We show that a flexible inflation targeting...

We analyse euro area investors' portfolio rebalancing during the ECB's Asset Purchase Programme at the security level. Our empirical analysis shows that euro area investors (in particular investment funds and households) actively rebalanced away from securities targeted under the Public Sector...

We study the transmission of monetary shocks across euro-area countries using a dynamic factor model and high-frequency identification. We develop a methodology to assess the degree of heterogeneity, which we find to be low in financial variables and output, but significant in consumption,...

Estimates of the natural interest rate are often useful in the analysis of monetary and other macroeconomic policies. The topic gathered much attention following the great financial crisis and the Euro Area debt crisis due to the uncertainty regarding the timing of monetary policy normalization...

This paper explores what history can tell us about the interactions between macroprudential and monetary policy. Based on numerous historical documents, we show that liquidity ratios similar to the Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) were commonly used as monetary policy tools by central banks...

We argue that in an economy with downward nominal wage rigidity, the output gap is negative on average. Because it is more difficult to cut wages than to increase them, firms reduce employment more during downturns than they increase employment during expansions. This is demonstrated in a simple...