This article compares two types of monetary policy rules - the Taylor-Rule and the Orphanides-Rule - with respect to their forecasting properties for the policy rates of the European Central Bank. In this respect the basic rules, results from estimated models and augmented rules are compared....

Helicopter money has once been proposed as a theoretical thought experiment by Milton Friedman in order to elucidate the effect of money injections into the macroeconomy over time. However, some Euro area member states nowadays consider helicopter money, i.e. permanent Quantitative Easing (QE),...

The Van Rompuy Report and also additional proposals made by the European Commission outlined steps for a ‘genuine Economic and Monetary Union’. This article explains, assesses and comments on the proposals made. Moreover, it outlines what could be recommendations in order to achieve a...

This paper identifies and measures fiscal spillovers in the EU countries empirically, using a structurally stable global vector autoregression (GVAR) model. For our purposes, the individual EU countries, as well as the most important international trading partners, are modelled with a special...

We analyze the importance of global shocks for the global economy and national policy makers. More specifically, we investigate whether monetary policy has become less effective in the wake of financial globalization. We also examine whether there is increasing uncertainty for central banks due...

This study assesses the impact of Brexit uncertainty on the UK and also on international financial markets, for the first and the second statistical moments. As financial markets are highly linked in general and several countries apart from the UK might be negatively affected, one may expect...

Building on the growing evidence on the importance of large data sets for empirical macroe-conomic modeling, we estimate a large-scale FAVAR model for 18 OECD member countries. We quantify the global effects of economic policy uncertainty shocks and check whether the signs, the magnitude, and...

This paper briefly assesses the effectiveness of the different non-standard monetary policy tools in the Euro Area. Its main focus is on the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) Programme which is praised by some as the ECB’s “magic wand”. Moreover, it discloses further possible unintended...

This paper tackles the issue of cross-section dependence for the monetary exchange rate model in the presence of unobserved common factors using panel data from 1973 until 2007 for 19 OECD countries. Applying a principal component analysis we distinguish between common factors and idiosyncratic...