This paper presents stylised facts about the business cycle of the euro area. The results suggest that the stylised facts for the euro area economy and the US are very similar. The magnitude of the fluctuations in consumption, investment, prices, inflation, interest rate, monetary aggregates...

In January 2007 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) published, on an ad hoc basis, a series of financial soundness indicators (FSIs) based on a common methodology (the IMF compilation Guide) for 62 countries, including all 27 European Union countries. The European Central Bank (ECB), jointly...

This paper shows that in ation in industrialized countries is largely a global phenomenon. First, the inflation rates of 22 OECD countries have a common factor that alone accounts for nearly 70 percent of their variance. This large variance share that is associated with Global Inflation is not...

Contents: 1. Forum Economique Franco-Allemand - Deutsch-Französisches Wirtschaftspolitisches Forum...1 -- 2. Opening Address, Klaus Bünger...2 -- 3. EMU and Transatlantic Exchange-Rate Stability - Agnès Bénassy-Quéré and Benoît Mojon...5 -- 4. What Exchange Rate Policy in EMU? - Manfred...

This paper analyses persistence differences in financial structure across countries of the euro area and whether they can lead to asymmetries in the transmission of the ECB policy. First, the paper examines the pass-through of money market rates to various bank retail rates and measures how this...

This paper analyses the effects of a change in monetary policy on firms' investment in Germany, France, Italy and Spain using a data set which provides aggregated balance sheet and profit and loss account data for 17 different industries and 3 different size classes. The main findings are...

This paper presents a complete set of results describing the effects of monetary policy in 10 countries of the euro area for the pre-EMU period. For each country, we impose one of three identification schemes depending on its monetary integration with Germany, the nominal anchor of the ERM. The...

Drawing on recent Eurosystem research that uses a range of econometric techniques and a number of new data sets, we propose a comprehensive description of how monetary policy affects the euro area economy. We focus mainly on three questions: (1) what are the stylised facts concerning the...

We revisit recent evidence on how monetary policy affects output and prices in the U.S. and in the euro area. The response patterns to a shift in monetary policy are similar in most respects, but differ noticeably as to the composition of output changes. In the euro area investment is the...

In most OECD countries, we cannot reject up to three breaks in the mean of inflation: one break in the late 1960’s-early 1970’s, one in the early-mid 1980’s and another break in the early 1990’s. These breaks tend to be associated more often to breaks in the mean of nominal variables...