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...

This paper compares impulse responses to monetary policy shocks in the euro area countries before the EMU and in the New Member States (NMS) from central-eastern Europe. We mitigate the small sample problem, which is especially acute for the NMS, by using a Bayesian estimation that combines...

The purpose of his paper is to evaluate the empirical relevance of real convergence on the process of nominal convergence for the new EU Member States. We discuss two of the main channels through which real convergence could affect relative prices with respect to the euro area productivity...

Inflation expectations constitute a subject of particular contemporary interest to central banks, especially those pursuing a monetary policy based on a strategy of direct inflation targeting. Macroeconomic theory indicates that the transmission of monetary policy impulses and their impact on...