Four years after the introduction of the euro, this paper provides an overview of the current structure and integration of the euro area financial systems and related policy initiatives. We first compare the euro area financial structure with that of the United States and Japan. Using new and...

Impact assessment (IA) of all major European Union (EU) policies is now mandatory. The form of IA used has been criticised for favouring corporate interests by overemphasising economic impacts and failing to adequately assess health impacts. Our study sought to assess how, why, and in what ways...

The paper provides a comprehensive overview of the historical problems and causes of the crisis, explains the choices available for the peripheral EU countries and the potential consequences, and discusses potential solutions which take into account how the EU operates. The Eurozone still makes...

Political idealism has prevailed over economic realism in the EU decision process. As a result, today’s Eurozone is a puzzle with too many missing pieces. Given the severity of the crisis, policymakers would be well advised to urgently take both structural and pragmatic measures to preserve...

The paper discusses the differences among countries of the Eurozone which impede growth. The paper offers solutions aimed at encouraging economic convergence to a higher level of standard of living. Economic disparity throughout the region has increased due to the global financial crisis. A...

This paper questions the relevance of using only the 5-year maturity CDS spreads to examine the CDS market response to the disclosure of a regulatory stress test results. Since the stress testing exercises are performed on short-term forward-looking stressed scenarios (1 to 3 years), we assume...

This paper studies the relative pricing of euro area sovereign CDS and the underlying government bonds. Our sample comprises weekly CDS and bond spreads of ten euro area countries for the period from January 2006 to June 2010. We first compare the determinants of CDS spreads and bond spreads and...

This article examines an equity pairs trading strategy using daily, weekly and monthly European share price data over the period 1998–2007. The authors shows that when stocks are matched into pairs with minimum distance between normalised historical prices, a simple trading rule based on...

This paper examines the underlying dynamics of selected euro-area sovereign bonds by employing a factor-augmenting vector autoregressive (FAVAR) model for the first time in the literature. This methodology allows for identifying the underlying transmission mechanisms of several factors; in...

This paper examines the underlying dynamics of the Euro-area sovereign bonds most in need of fiscal consolidation by employing a Bayesian time varying parameter factor augmenting VAR (TVP-FAVAR thereafter) model. This methodology is applied for the first time and allows multivariate stochastic...