The belief that the ECB follows the US Federal Reserve in setting its policy is so entrenched with market participants and commentators that the search for empirical support would seem to be a trivial task. However, this is not the case. We find that the ECB is indeed often influenced by the...

On 11-12 May 2011, SUERF and the Belgian Financial Forum, in association with the Brussels Finance Institute and the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) organized the 29th SUERF Colloquium “New Paradigms in Money and Finance?” All the papers in the present SUERF Study are based on...

The EMU accession countries are obliged to fulfill the Maastricht convergence criteria prior to entering the EMU. This paper uses a DSGE model of a two-sector small open economy, to address the following question: How do the Maastricht convergence criteria modify optimal monetary policy in an...

This paper presents a generalized framework where a discretionary government finds it ex-post optimal to create a downward bias in the exchange rate in addition to the inflation bias of Barro-Gordon type. This dual credibility model helps explain the empirical pattern of public debt financing...

In 2009 the euro entered a crisis from which it has yet to emerge. It has led to increased social tensions across the Eurozone and even speculation that the euro might break up. Against this background this paper sets out to re-examine the Hard ECU, the British government's 1990 alternative to...

In this paper, the monetary policy independence of European nations in the years before European Monetary Union (EMU) is investigated using cointegration techniques. Daily data is used to assess pairwise relationships between individual EMU nations and ‘lead' nation Germany, to assess the...

In this article, the issue of the monetary independence problem in view of the Romania's European Monetary Union accession is investigated empirically. It is frequently argued that for such a country, the main cost of participation in a currency area is the loss of monetary policy independence....

On 11-12 May 2011, SUERF and the Belgian Financial Forum, in association with the Brussels Finance Institute and the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) organized the 29th SUERF Colloquium "New Paradigms in Money and Finance?". All the papers in the present SUERF Study are based on...

There are many issues associated with the Eurozone accession of Poland. The goal of this paper is to analyse one, but very important aspect, namely – the macroeconomic impact of the loss of autonomous monetary policy. In order to answer this question, we build a two country DSGE model with...