This paper offers a comprehensive comparison of the structure of banking and financial markets in the euro area. Based on this, several hypotheses about the role of banks in monetary policy transmission are developed. Many of the predictions that have been proposed for the U.S. are deemed...

We analyze the relationship between institutional quality and firm efficiency. Using rich data on firms in the European Union between 2005 and 2012, we show that high institutional quality lowers the share of persistently inefficiently used assets. The adverse effect of low institutional quality...

The rules laid down in Article 32 of the Protocol No. 18 on the Statute of the European System of Central Banks and of the European Central Bank of the Maastricht Treaty will significantly redistribute European seignorage income and hence the implicit entitlement to the 352 billion stock of...

While the formal decision of the ECB Council to impose interest on Target claims and liabilities is meaningless, this paper shows that the pooling of primary interest income among national central banks in the Eurozone implies that Target and cash balances do, in fact, bear an effective rate of...

This paper reconsiders the determinants of the exchange rate by studying the historical episode after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Testing a modified portfolio balance model, we attribute the strength of the deutschmark in the early nineties and the puzzling decline of the euro during its...