There is a broad consensus that the quality of the political system and its institutions are fundamental for a country's prosperity. The paper focuses on political events in Italy over the past 35 years and asks whether the adoption of the euro in 1999 has helped insulate Italy's financial...

We study the determinants of trust in the ECB as measured by the European Commission's Eurobarometer survey in particular during the global financial crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis. We find that the fall in trust in the ECB in crisis times can be rather well explained based on the...

This paper estimates a hybrid New Keynesian model on euro area data and evaluates the performance of different simple policy rules and of the optimal unconstrained rule under commitment. The study reaches two main conclusions. First, inflation is found to be mainly forward-looking in the euro...

Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has transformed Europe and has created an integrated pan-European economy. Much research has focused on understanding this integration process and what benefits and costs it entails. This paper identifies a political economy channel of EMU as the monetary union...

The paper provides a systematic empirical analysis of the role of the housing market in the macroeconomy in the US and in the euro area. First, it establishes some stylised facts concerning key variables in the housing market, such as the real house price, residential investment and mortgage...