This paper argues that when EU member states joined EMU, this resulted in domestic institutional changes in the areas of fiscal policy-making and wage-setting. The paper argues that these changes were triggered by two facts: (i) in EMU, the monetary policy can no longer be used as an instrument...

This summer subprime crisis and the subsequent credit crunch have placed central banks again on the spot. In the USA and Europe, central banks have made significant steps to calm down financial turbulence by engineering liquidity injections, and interest rate shift. In Europe, following a recent...

This paper analyses the implications of a continued divergence of TARGET2 balances for monetary policy in the euro area. The accumulation of TARGET2 claims (liabilities) would make the ECB’s liquidity management asymmetric once the TARGET2 claims in core countries have crowded out central bank...

At the start of the Third Stage of EMU, it was by no means clear whether the ECB would succeed in setting up an efficient framework for distributing liquidity throughout the euro-zone. Now in retrospect, however, the ECB appears to have been quite successful. In this paper, we will look at the...

[From the introduction]. The synchronicity of cycles in real output is a subject that has attracted increased attention in the eld of economics, largely because not only is the international synchronicity of turning points of business cycles a "stylized fact", but also because within a monetary...

This summer subprime crisis and the subsequent credit crunch have placed central banks again on the spot. In the USA and Europe, central banks have made significant steps to calm down financial turbulence by engineering liquidity injections, and interest rate shift. In Europe, following a recent...

At the start of the Third Stage of EMU, it was by no means clear whether the ECB would succeed in setting up an efficient framework for distributing liquidity throughout the euro-zone. Now in retrospect, however, the ECB appears to have been quite successful. In this paper, we will look at the...