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 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...

This report provides an overview of the methods and results of the TRENDS (Transport and Environment Database System) project. The aim of this project was to produce a range of transparent, consistent and comparable indicators of the environmental pressure caused by transport. Results cover the...

The document describes the evolution of intra-EU current account asymmetries. Some experimental results obtained using a modelling approach to derive asymmetry-free European aggregates are presented. The results are not usable at the national (Member State) level and they will not eliminate...

The analysis of the business cycle for the entire European Union and the Monetary Union for the purpose of economic and monetary policy needs European-wide aggregated statistics. Europe has generally chosen to obtain such European aggregates by combining national statistics. european-wide single...