The ECB has been arguing in the past that since there is no trade-off between price stability and financial stability, the pursuit of price stability is the best a central bank can do to also maintain financial stability. We argue that there is a potential trade-off between price stability and...

"This paper deals with potential instabilities in the Eurozone stemming from an insufficient interplay between monetary policy and reform effort on the one hand and the emergence of intra-Euro area divergences on the other. As a first step, we assess the effect of EMU on structural reform and...

In this paper we compare alternative approaches for the construction of time series of macroeconomic variables for Unified Germany prior to 1991, and then use them for the construction of corresponding time series for the euro area. The resulting series for Germany and the euro area are compared...

This paper provides evidence on the reliability of euro area real-time output gap estimates. A genuine real-time data set for the euro area is used, including vintages of several sets of euro area output gap estimates available from 1999 to 2006. It turns out that real-time estimates of the...