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...

Right from the start of the European currency union, trade imbalances could be observed in the current accounts and trade balances of the euro countries. The business cycle upswing reaching into 2008 and the strong inflow of cheap money led to a strong economic expansion especially in the...

In this paper we present a novel approach to the empirical validation of the intertemporal approach to the current account. We develop a calibrated model highlighting the role of consumption smoothing and capital accumulation in the economic convergence process. After solving the model, we...

Since the breakdown of the Bretton Woods System diverging current account positions in Europe have prevailed. While the Southern and Western European countries have tended to run current account deficits, the current accounts of the Central and Northern European countries, in particular Germany,...

What are the drivers of the large Target2 (T2) balances that have emerged in the European Monetary Union since the start of the financial crisis in 2007? This paper examines the extent to which the evolution of national T2 balances can be statistically associated with cross-border private...

In this paper, we examine the macroeconomic effects of alternative fiscal consolidation policies in the New Area-Wide Model (NAWM), a two-country open-economy model of the euro area developed at the European Central Bank (cf. Coenen et al., 2007). We model fiscal consolidation as a permanent...

The stagnation of the economy in the Euro area since 2000 is closely connected to the dominance of purely long-run supply-side oriented policies in the Euro area. While exports and profits soared, domestic demand has been weak. The neglect of cyclical and demand factors appears to be the major...

In this paper, we revisit the effects of government spending shocks on private consumption within an estimated New-Keynesian DSGE model of the euro area featuring non-Ricardian households. Employing Bayesian inference methods, we show that the presence of non-Ricardian households is in general...

With the global crisis, the policy stance around the world has been shaken by massive government and central bank efforts to prevent the meltdown of markets, banks, and the economy. Fiscal packages, in varied sizes, have been adopted throughout the world after years of proclaimed fiscal...

Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) can be characterised as a complicated set of legislation and institutions governing monetary and fiscal responsibilities.The measures of fiscal responsibility are to be guided by the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), which sets rules for fiscal policy and makes a...