[eng] Exchange Rate Uncertainty and Unemployment in the Accession Countries : A Case for Euroization by Ansgar Belke and Ralph Setzer . The traditional “ optimum currency area ” approach posits that little is lost in the transition to a very hard peg to a currency union if exchange rate...

The impact of global banking on financial stability and the connected post-crisis challenges have been under-researched before the crisis. We interpret ‘global banking’ as ‘global central banking’, focus on the role of international monetary policies and global liquidity for financial...

The purpose of this contribution is to illustrate the interaction between oil prices and the global savings equilibrium which can invert the usual IS type relationship between growth and interest rates. Higher growth is usually associated with higher interest rates. But higher growth leads to...

This paper examines the importance of the economic sentiments of some macroeconomic key variables in Estonia, Slovenia and Latvia. We analyze the importance of domestic as well as foreign sentiments with respect to these economies against the background of their accession to the European...

We investigate the linkage between business cycle convergence and financial portfolio choice for a panel of 18 EU countries. We construct an index of similarity of financial portfolios which we then put into context with the view that “the financial world” has an impact on business cycles...

The current instruments in the EU to deal with debt and liquidity crises include the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism (EFSM). Both are temporary in nature (3 years). In terms of an efficient future crisis management framework one has...

High equilibrium unemployment and the inflation bias in some EU countries require fundamental reforms of labour-market institutions. Impacts of different monetary regimes inside and outside EMU on the incentives for labour- market reforms are examined in a Barro- Gordon framework from the...

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a crucial role in innovation, economic growth and job creation. Generally, SMEs face special problems when trying to access funding. Their situation is further complicated by the European economic crisis and a fragmentation of financial markets in...

Traditional specifications of export equations incorporate foreign demand as a demand pull factor and the real exchange rate as a relative price variable. However, such standard export equations have failed to explain the export performance of euro area countries during the crisis period. In...