Establishment of the European Central Bank presents a rare opportunity to define the operations of a central bank without a prior track record. This paper asks what might be learnt from the recent experience of inflation targeting at the Bank of England before the ECB specifies an, as yet...

Understanding international migration trends is of great relevance for policy making. Migration affects the labour market, competitiveness, and growth of a country. It has social, as well as economic repercussions. This is especially true for a small, open economy like Cyprus. Thus, the ability...

This paper assesses the role of exchange rates in moderating the impact of economic disturbances in the new member states of the European Union, and finds some evidence in favour of this proposition. Exchange rates are mostly driven by real (demand) shocks, whilst output by real supply shocks....

This paper discusses the reasoning behind the exchange rate policies set out in the Maastricht Treaty of the European Union. The question of the appropriate exchange rate policies for new member states of the EU should be seen from the wider perspective of Economic and Monetary Union, and the...

In this textbook Mervyn Lewis and Paul Mizen cover all the material required for a complete course on monetary economics. Their book integrates all the immense changes of recent years. Taking the UK as their starting point, the authors have written a clear and interesting account of both...

In this paper we argue that banks anticipate short-term market rates when setting interest rates on loans and deposits. In order to include anticipated rates in an empirical model, we use two methods to forecast market rates - a level, slope, curvature model and a principal components model -...

This paper deals with the existence and identification of a common European growth cycle. Univariate Markov switching autoregressions (MS-AR) are used for individual countries in order to detect changes in the mean growth rate of industrial production. A Markov switching vector autoregression...

This article establishes a co-integration analysis for the euro area (sample period: 1983-2000), identifying three co-integrating vectors: one which can be labelled money demand (in which real M3 money balances are related to output, with unit elasticity, and the long rate of interest); another...

The European Monetary Union has been in operation since 1 January 1999. The paper offers an interim assessment of the operations of the European Central Bank (ECB) during this period. It describes how the ECB defined its monetary strategy and carried out its policy. The evaluation offered in the...

This paper deals with the existence and identification of a common European growth cycle. Univariate Markov switching autoregressions are used for individual countries in order to detect changes in the mean growth rate of industrial production. A Markov switching vector autoregression model is...