This paper provides evidence on whether the creation of the euro has changed the way global turbulences a¤ect euro area and other economies. Specifically, it considers the impact of global shocks on the competitiveness of individual euro area countries and assesses whether their responses to...

This paper provides evidence on whether the creation of the euro has changed the way global turbulences affect euro area and other economies. Specifically, it considers the impact of global shocks on the competitiveness of individual euro area countries and assesses whether their responses to...

Net trading income is an important but volatile source of income for many euro area banks, highly sensitive to changes in financial market conditions. Using a representative sample of European banks, we study the distribution of net trading income (normalized by total assets) conditional to...

This paper provides new empirical evidence on policy-makers' voting patterns on interest rates. Applying (pooled) Taylor-type rules and using real-time information available from published inflation reports and voting records, the paper tests for heterogeneity among committee members in three...

The objective of this paper is to investigate which factors ] macroeconomic, policy ]related or institutional ] foster the implementation of structural reforms. To this objective, we look at episodes of structural reforms over three decades across 40 OECD and EU countries and link them to such...

We assess the fiscal behaviour in the European Union countries for the period 1990-2005 via the responsiveness of budget balances to several determinants. The results show that the existence of effective fiscal rules, the degree of public spending decentralization, and the electoral cycle can...

We study the effect of counterparty risk on the ability of Italian banks to access the foreign unsecured interbank market during the sovereign debt crisis in the second half of 2011. With the onset of the crisis, interest rates in the Italian interbank market soared and foreign lending decreased...

We study the effect of government encouraged or mandated interchange fee ceilings on consumer and merchant adoption and usage of payment cards in an economy where card acceptance is far from complete. We believe that we are the first to use bank-level data to study the impact of interchange fee...

We build a model of credit card pricing that explicitly takes into account credit functionality. We show that a monopoly card network always selects an interchange fee that exceeds the level that maximizes consumer surplus. If regulators only care about consumer surplus, a conservative...

In a payment card association such as Visa, each time a consumer pays by card, the bank of the merchant (acquirer) pays an interchange fee (IF) to the bank of the cardholder (issuer) to carry out the transaction. This paper studies the determinants of socially and privately optimal IFs in a card...