Two seemingly unconnected empirical results suggest an intriguing mechanism. First, economic integration helps harmonize prices internationally, with trade being the primary channel (Rogoff 1996, Goldberg and Knetter 1997). Second, monetary union may greatly increase the amount of trade among...

This study poses the question about whether labour market institutions can explain unemployment rates in the ten new European Union member states. In five out of the ten new member states, unemployment rates lie above the average in the 15 member states of the European Union (EU-15) that...

We quantify the degree of persistence in unemployment rates of transition countries using a variety of methods benchmarked against the EU. In part of the paper, we work with the concept of linear u0093Hysteresisu0094 as described by the presence of unit roots in unemployment. Since this is...

This paper uses data on German government bond futures options to examine the behaviour of market expectations around monetary policy actions of the European Central Bank (ECB). In particular, this paper focuses on the asymmetries in bond market expectations, as measured by the skewness of...

Young people in Europe continue to experience great difficulties in entering the labour market. Although the youth unemployment rate in a few Member States has started to fall, overall 23% of young European job-seekers aged 15–24 could not find a job in January 2014. In 2012, 14.6 million...

In this paper we propose a relatively simple procedure to predict Euro-zone industrial production using mostly data derived from the business surveys of the three major economies within the European Monetary Union (France, Germany, and Italy). The basic idea is that of estimating business...

Poverty increases were recorded mostly in terms of severe material deprivation and low work intensity rates starting from 2010 and were concentrated in those countries most severely hit by the crisis. Econometric estimates suggest that while measures of relative poverty do not appear to have...