In a monetary union, national fiscal deficits are of limited help to counteract deep recessions; union-wide support is needed. A common euro-area budget (1) should provide a temporary but significant transfer of resources in case of large regional shocks, (2) would be an instrument to counteract...

The construction of the euro area left aside the question of a fiscal union, but the crisis re-opened the debate. Of the three classical functions of fiscal policy – provision of public goods, redistribution and stabilisation – only the last provides a clear justification for fiscal policy...

Fiscal rules, such as the excessive deficit procedure and the stability and growth pact (SGP), aim at constraining government behavior. Milesi-Ferretti (2003) develops a model in which governments circumvent such rules by reverting to creative accounting. The amount of this creative accounting...

Critics of ECB loose monetary policy warn against the risk that this policy squeezes banks' profits, which could ultimately lead to higher lending rates and lower credit supply. This discussion has arisen in the euro area in particular, as banks' profitability is low on average and some banks...

Critics of ECB loose monetary policy warn against the risk that this policy squeezes banks' profits, which could ultimately lead to higher lending rates and lower credit supply. This discussion has arisen in the euro area in particular, as banks' profitability is low on average and some banks...

This study provides a systematic evaluation of financial assistance for Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Cyprus. All four programmes, and in particular the Greek one, are very large financially compared to previous international programmes because macroeconomic imbalances and the loss of price...

The papers of this compilation, prepared for the December 2013 session of the Monetary Dialogue, comment on various economic aspects regarding the balance sheets of EU banks supervised by the SSM, how can a sufficient re-capitalisation of the European Banking system be ensured most effectively,...

The notes in this compilation assess and comment on various aspects of the collateral policy and framework of the Eurosystem. In particular, the notes consider the economic implications associated with the current ECB collateral policy for asset allocation and relative asset price developments...