This paper is an empirical critique of Barry Eichengreen's interpretation of the exceptional growth performance of Western Europe during the 1950s and 1960s. The main part of the paper shows that, at least for the important case of West Germany, Eichengreen fs view of a broad-based economic and...

Official (government-to-government) lending is much larger than commonly known, often surpassing total private cross-border capital flows, especially during disasters such as wars, financial crises and natural catastrophes. We assemble the first comprehensive long-run dataset of official...

In this paper, we develop a financial stress index for France that can be used as a real-time composite indicator for the state of financial stability in France. We take 17 financial variables from different market segments and extract a common stress component using a dynamic approximate factor...

The large Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP) which the ECB started in 2015 on the basis of monetary policy purposes, had major side-effects on fiscal policy. One concerns the programme's uncommon seigniorage effects. We find that the PSPP not only led to partly negative seigniorage gains,...

In a series of summits, leading countries of the world will meet to draw up an international arrangement for financial stability. Such a rule system should prevent a financial crisis as we have seen it in 2007 and 2008. It should include appropriate principles of monetary policy, rules for...

We study the design of optimal monetary policy (Ramsey policies) in a model with sticky prices and unionized labour markets. Collective wage bargaining and unions monopoly power tend to dampen wage fluctuations and to amplify employment fluctuations relatively to a DNK model with walrasian...

When taken to examine disinflation monetary policies, the current workhorse DSGE model of business cycle fluctuations successfully accounts for the main stylized facts in terms of recessionary effects and sacrifice ratio. We complement the transitional analysis of the short-run costs with a...

The literature has shown that product market frictions and firms dynamic play a crucial role in reconciling standard DSGE with several stylized facts. This paper studies optimal monetary policy in a DSGE model with sticky prices and oligopolistic competition. In this model firms' monopolistic...

Die Schaffung eines einheitlichen Geldes in Europa und die Vergemeinschaftung der Geldpolitik bedeuten eine einschneidende institutionelle Änderung. In diesem Beitrag wird analysiert, was zu tun und was zu lassen ist, damit das historisch bedeutsame Vorhaben ein Erfolg wird. Zwölf...

The stability pact is intended to bind the hands of national fiscal policy with respect to debt and thus protect the euro as a common currency. To what extent the value of money is stable depends on the solidity of the government’s finances. To weaken the pact will imply a loss of confidence...