Do public sector wages exert pressures on private sector wages, or has the private sector a leadership role in wage setting? This paper tries to isolate the pure signalling effect that one sector might exert on the other by controlling for other determinants of wages (prices, productivity,...

Short-term fiscal indicators based on public accounts data are often used by European policy makers. They represent one of the main sources of publicly available intra-annual fiscal information. Nevertheless, these indicators have received limited attention from the academic literature analysing...

It is argued that bidders in liquidity-providing central bank operations should typically possess declining marginal valuations. Based on this hypothesis, we construct an equilibrium in central bank refinancing operations organised as variable rate tenders. In the case of the discriminatory...

The analysis of the macroeconomic impact of fiscal policies in the euro area has been traditionally limited by the absence of quarterly fiscal data. To overcome this problem, we provide two new databases in this paper. Firstly, we construct a quarterly database of euro area fiscal variables for...

This paper contributes to the existing literature on central bank repo auctions. It is based on a structural econometric approach, whereby the primitives of bidding behavior (individual bid schedules and bid-shading components) are directly estimated. With the estimated parameters we calibrate a...

The theory of liquidity management under uncertainty predicts that, under certain conditions, commercial banks will accumulate minimum reserve requirements linearly over the reserve maintenance period. This prediction is empirically tested using daily data (from March 2004 until February 2007)...

In this paper I evaluate the usefulness of a set of fiscal indicators as early-warning-signal tools for annual General Government Net Lending developments for some EMU countries (Belgium, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, The Netherlands, Ireland, Austria, Finland) and an EMU aggregate. The...

This paper assesses the sources of volatility persistence in Euro Area money market interest rates and the existence of linkages relating volatility dynamics. The main findings of the study are as follows. Firstly, there is evidence of stationary long memory, of similar degree, in all series....