This paper analyses the adjustment mechanism in the euro area prior to the crisis. Results show that the real exchange rate adjusted to redress cyclical divergences and that after monetary unification, real exchange rate dynamics became less reactive to country-specific shocks but also less...

The European Commission's approach to the supervision and restructuring of the EU banking system has numerous shortcomings. As an alternative, this article proposes a European Resolution Authority and a European Restructuring Fund for systemically important banks and the implementation of a levy...

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership will reduce tariffs and lower regulatory hurdles that currently impair trade between the EU and the US. However, TTIP has been controversial from the outset. Non-governmental organisations are concerned about lowered health and environmental...

The eurozone crisis has revealed certain shortcomings of the EMU, such as its vulnerability to asymmetric shocks and its inability to act as predicted by the theory of optimum currency areas. Although the share of intra-EU trade has increased since the introduction of the euro, dissimilarities...

The most prominent and debated issues in the negotiations on the next Multiannual Financial Framework for the EU for the period 2014-2020 were the overall budget volume, the structure of expenditures and the continuation of the rebates for (some) net contributor countries. However, the system of...

Using a novel approach, this paper analyses the deliberately communicated uncertainty of the ECB to the market. Specifically, it semantically analyses the uncertainty expressed in official ECB press statements. The analysis shows how the ECB tries to alert or appease the market with different...

Given the shortcomings of the current responses to the sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone, the author proposes utilising national gold reserves as collateral for government debt. Gold backing would be quite attractive to bond investors and would significantly ease the burden of high sovereign...