We study the convergence of European bond markets and the anchoring of inflation expectations in euro area countries using high-frequency bond yield data for France, Germany, Italy and Spain. We find that Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has led to substantial convergence in euro area sovereign...

Inflation in the euro area has been below the European Central Bank's target for almost a year now and it is also expected to remain at a very low level in the near future. On the one hand, such a low level of inflation is not in line with the ECB's objective. On the other hand, there is the...

Inflation in the euro area has been below the European Central Bank's target for almost a year now and it is also expected to remain at a very low level in the near future. On the one hand, such a low level of inflation is not in line with the ECB's objective. On the other hand, there is the...

The crisis in the European currency area is not yet over. Although the situation in the financial markets is currently relatively calm, the economic crisis appears to be bottoming out in most countries. Nevertheless, there are still fundamental design flaws in the Monetary Union. If these are...

The establishment of the ECB and with it the launch of the euro has arguably been a unique endeavor in economic history, representing an important experiment in central banking. This note aims to summarize some of the main lessons learned from this experiment and sketch some of the prospects for...

We log-linearise the Dellas and Tavlas (DT) model of monetary union and solve it analytically. We find that the intuition of optimal currency analysis of DT's second generation open economy model is essentially the same as that of first generation models. Monetary union results in no welfare...

We log-linearise the Dellas and Tavlas (DT) model of monetary union and solve it analytically. We find that the intuition of optimal currency area analysis of DT’s second generation open economy model is essentially the same as that of first generation models. Monetary union results in no...

The crisis in the European currency area is not over yet. Although the situation in the financial markets is currently relatively calm, the economic crisis appears to be bottoming out in most countries. Nevertheless, fundamental design flaws in the Monetary Union continue to exist. If these are...

In this paper we estimate a small model of the euro area to be used as a laboratory for evaluating the performance of alternative monetary policy strategies. We start with the relationship between output and inflation and investigate the fit of the nominal wage contracting model due to Taylor...

In this paper, we examine the cost of insurance against model uncertainty for the Euro area considering four alternative reference models, all of which are used for policy-analysis at the ECB.We find that maximal insurance across this model range in terms of aMinimax policy comes at moderate...