The EU agenda for improving competitiveness is missing in action. Economic competitiveness has been a central plank in the development of the European Union - a relentless quest for policies that lead to more prosperity and that make European companies in world markets more successful. However,...

We model the impact of bank mergers on loan competition, banks' reserve holdings and aggregate liquidity. Banks compete in a differentiated loan market, hold reserves against liquidity shocks, and refinance in the interbank market. A merger creates an internal money market that induces financial...

We lay out an empirical and a theoretical model to analyze the effects of non-fundamental exchange rate volatility on economic activity and welfare. In the first part of the paper, the GARCH-SVARmodel is applied to measure empirically the effect of the conditional exogenous exchange rate...