The role that the price of oil plays in economic analysis in central banks as well as in financial markets has evolved over time. Oil is not seen anymore just as a input to production but also as a barometer of global economic activity as well as a financial asset. A high frequency structural...

We focus on the implications of the shale oil boom for the global supply of oil. We begin with a stylized model with two producers, one facing low production costs and one higher production costs but potentially lower adjustment costs, competing á la Stackelberg. We find that the supply...

We investigate the public-private wage differentials in ten euro area countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain). To account for differences in employment characteristics between the two sectors, we focus on micro data taken from EU-SILC....

This paper examines two competing approaches for calculating current account benchmarks, i.e. the external sustainability approach á la Lane and Milesi-Ferretti (LM) versus the structural current accounts literature (SCA) based on panel econometric techniques. The aim is to gauge the medium...

The paper evaluates the impact of a phased-in introduction of capital requirements on equity, risk-taking, and probability of default for a sample of European systemically important banks. Contrary to the case of a one-off introduction of capital requirements, this study does not find evidence...

What drives external performance of countries? This is a recurring question in academia and policy. The factors underlying export growth are receiving great attention, as countries struggle to grow out of the crisis by increasing exports and as protectionist discourses take foot again. Despite...

Macroeconomic imbalances increase the vulnerability of an economy to adverse shocks, which in turn can lead to crises with severe economic and social costs. We propose an early warning model that predicts such crises. We identify a set of macroeconomic indicators capturing domestic and external...

This paper presents new evidence on the importance of insolvency frameworks for private sector debt deleveraging and for the resolution of non-performing loans (NPL). We construct an aggregate insolvency framework index (IFI), which is used as explanatory variable in the empirical analysis. By...

Digitalisation may be viewed as a sequence of supply and technology shocks affecting the economy through productivity and output, employment and labour markets, competition and market structure. This paper focuses on the effects of digitalisation on economic growth, and how those effects may be...

Fulfilling the commitments embedded in the Paris Agreement requires a climate-technology revolution. Patented innovation of low-carbon technologies is lower in the EU than in selected peers, and very heterogeneous across member states. We motivate this fact with an endogenous model of directed...