The services sector is increasingly important for the euro area economy, but productivity growth in the sector has stalled over the past two decades. Remaining barriers to cross-border trade in services within the EU Single Market contribute to this weak performance. Our empirical analysis...

How do countries enhance their exports of goods in a largely tariff-free environment? Our investigation of export performance of new member states in the European Union single market, which provides a natural control for barrier-free environment, points to the importance of structural reforms,...

This paper reasseses the significance of persistent current imbalances as they become easier to finance in the process of European integration. After highlighting some limitations of simple saving-investment guidelines for policies toward the current account, the paper shows that an economy’s...

We compute government spending multipliers for the Euro Area (EA) contingent on the interestgrowth differential, the so-called r-g. Whether the fiscal shock occurs when r-g is positive or negative matters for the size of the multiplier. Median estimates vary conditional on the specification, but...

This paper argues that in the European Union (EU) deposit insurance funds are too difficult to use in bank resolution and too easy to use outside resolution. The paper proposes reforms in three areas for the effective management of bank failures of small and medium-sized banks in the European...

We build a factor-augmented interacted panel vector-autoregressive model of the Euro Area (EA) and estimate it with Bayesian methods to compute government spending multipliers. The multipliers are contingent on the overall monetary policy stance, captured by a shadow monetary policy rate. In the...

This paper outlines a simple three-country macroeconomic model designed to focus on the transmission of external shocks to Portugal. Building on the framework developed by Berg et al (2006), this model differentiates between shocks originating from both inside and outside the euro area, as well...

We analyze the impact of trade policy uncertainty on investment in the euro area. Our identification strategy assumes that countries that are relatively more dependent on global trade networks exhibit a higher sensitivity of investment with respect to trade uncertainty. We find that the...