The rise of inflation in 2021 and 2022 surprised many macroeconomists who ignored the earlier surge in money growth because past instability in the demand for simple-sum monetary aggregates had made these aggregates unreliable indicators. We find that the demand for more theoretically-based...

This paper studies the relationship between inflation, output, money and interest rates in the euro area, using data spanning 1980 2000. The P* model is shown to have considerable empirical support. Thus, the price gap' or, equivalently, the real money gap' (the gap between current real balances...

The European Monetary Union (EMU) will involve socialization of the existing seigniorage wealth of the national central banks, because the Euro will have to be bought by these banks in exchange for assets which have been accumulated in the historical process of money creation. This socialization...

The creation of the euro and the European Central Bank is a remarkable and unprecedented event in economic and political history: creating a supranational central bank and leaving eleven countries without national currencies of their own. The experience of the first year confirms that one size...

Borrowing from the experience of environmental markets, this paper proposes a system of tradable deficit permits as an efficient mechanism for implementing fiscal constraints in the European Monetary Union: having chosen an aggregate target for the Union and an initial distribution of permits,...

In this paper I focus on two specific hazard areas in the transition from Stage Two to Stage Three of European economic and monetary union (EMU), as well as on some key problems of Stage Three that EMU's monetary and fiscal structures appear ill-prepared to handle. The transitional hazards are...

The paper discusses the choice between inflation targeting and monetary targeting as a strategy for the Eurosystem, the actual strategy the Eurosystem announced in the fall of 1998, the framework for policy decisions appropriate for achieving the goals of the Eurosystem, the role of exchange...

Among the many challenges facing the new Eurosystem is the possibility that the regions of the euro area will respond differently to interest rate changes. In this essay, I provide evidence that differences in financial structure are the proximate cause for these national asymmetries in the...

This paper formulates a back of the envelope approach to study the effects of monetary policy on household consumption expenditures. We analyze several transmission mechanisms operating through direct, partial equilibrium channels--intertemporal substitution and net interest rate exposure--and...

Using new data on security-level portfolio holdings by investor type and across countries in the euro area, we study portfolio rebalancing during the European Central Bank's (ECB) purchase programme that started in March 2015. To quantify changes in risk concentration, we estimate the evolution...