Despite the fact that banks in Central Europe are burdened by extraordinarily high bad loan ratios, the recent financial crisis in South East Asia and Russia, has not led to a massive failure of banks in the region. In this paper, we study economic trends and policies that may have helped to...

Open market operations play a key role in allocating central bank funds to the banking system and thereby to steer short-term interest rates in line with the stance of monetary policy. Many central banks apply so-called "fixed rate tender" auctions in their open market operations. This note...

Contents: 1. Forum Economique Franco-Allemand - Deutsch-Französisches Wirtschaftspolitisches Forum...1 -- 2. Opening Address, Klaus Bünger...2 -- 3. EMU and Transatlantic Exchange-Rate Stability - Agnès Bénassy-Quéré and Benoît Mojon...5 -- 4. What Exchange Rate Policy in EMU? - Manfred...

Contents: 1. Das Deutsch-Französische Wirtschaftspolitische Forum...1 -- 2. Opening Address, Dominique Strauss-Kahn...2 -- 3. Does EMU Need an Employment Pact? - Klaus-Werner Schatz, Institute of World Economics, Kiel...3 -- 4. Is the Stability Pact an Efficient Agreement? - Patrick Artus,...

The Eurosystem is the fifth decentralized system in the history of central banks. It consists of the European Central Bank (ECB) and twelve National Central Banks (NCBs) forming the European Monetary Union (EMU). The stark decentrality of this System is so little known that ubiquitous statements...

This paper investigates in a consistent semi-structural empirical framework three current issues of monetary policy in the euro area. First, regarding policy transmission we offer a three-stage procedure to combine the efficient estimation of economic structure prior to EMU with current ECB...