I analyze spillover effects from Euro area monetary policy shocks to thirteen EU countries outside the Euro area, i.e., ten countries from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and three Western EU members. The analysis is based on a FAVAR model with two blocks which exploits a large cross-country...

We empirically assess the impact of competitiveness measured by unit labor costs for current account balances in the Euro area. For this purpose, we estimate a panel with annual observations from 2000 to 2013. Our findings confirm the importance of competitiveness: Higher unit labor costs growth...

Essentially, the impact of the currency union on member countries depends on whether the common currency area is optimal in the sense that the effect of the asymmetric shocks is small, Mundell (1961). Typically, researchers use VAR of different types to analyze the data. For robustness, we use...

This paper examines the current state of price convergence amongst the eleven initial EMU member states. Special attention is given to possible changes in the convergence process during the euro cash changeover. We apply the convergence approach using both panel estimates of changes in the...

We investigate convergence in European price level, unit labor cost, income, and productivity data over the period of 1960-2006 using the non-linear time-varying coefficients factor model proposed by Phillips and Sul (2007). This approach is extremely flexible on order to model a large number of...

Macroeconomic imbalances in the EMU are at the heart of the current crisis. A widely popular explanation for the high current account deficits in the Southern European countries is that they lack a large, competitive and export-oriented industrial sector. The paper tests the hypothesis that...

This paper uses a panel VAR (PVAR) approach to estimating, analysing and forecasting price dynamics in four different sectors - industry, services, construction, and agriculture - across the four largest euro area economies - Germany, France, Italy and Spain - and the euro area as a whole. By...

We define nowcasting as the prediction of the present, the very near future and the very recent past. Crucial in this process is to use timely monthly information in order to nowcast key economic variables, such as e.g. GDP, that are typically collected at low frequency and published with long...

The introduction of the Euro has been accompanied by the hope that intra-EMU trade would increase and that prices would converge due to increased elasticities of international substitution. This paper contributes to the literature on the Euro’s effects on international trade by analyzing price...

We explore how changes in capital-based macroprudential regulation affect theexposure of national banking sectors to domestic government debt in the euro area,thus strengthening or weakening the sovereign-bank nexus. To do so, we construct ameasure of macroprudential policy based on...