This paper investigates why Europe fared particularly poorly in the global economic crisis that began in August 2007. It questions the self-portrait of Europe as the victim of external shocks, pushed off track by reckless policies pursued elsewhere. It argues instead that Europe had not only...

Not since the Great Depression have monetary policy matters and institutions weighed so heavily in commercial, financial, and political arenas. Apart from the eurozone crisis and global monetary policy issues, for nearly two years all else has counted for little more than noise on a relative...

This study assesses the European Central Bank’s (ECB) crisis management performance and potential for crisis resolution. The study investigates the institutional and functional constraints that delineate the ECB’s scope for policy action under crisis conditions, and how the bank has actually...

This paper investigates the European Central Bank's (ECB) monetary policies. It identifies an antigrowth bias in the bank's monetary policy approach: the ECB is quick to hike, but slow to ease. Similarly, while other players and institutional deficiencies share responsibility for the euro's...

Since the beginning of the transition process from centrally planed to market economies, East European countries have experienced relatively high inflation and a market depreciation of their currency. Their monetary systems have gone through dramatic changes in the recent ten years, making the...

In this paper we adopt a Bayesian approach towards the estimation of the monetary policy preference parameters in a general equilibrium framework. We start from the model presented by Smets and Wouters (2003) for the euro area where, in the original set up, monetary policy behaviour is described...

We analyse the relationship between tail risk and crisis measures by governments and the central bank. Using an adjusted Merton model in a game theoretical set-up, the analysis shows that the participation constraint for interventions by the central bank and the governments is less binding if...

In this paper we adopt a Bayesian approach towards the estimation of the monetary policy preference parameters in a general equilibrium framework. We start from the model presented by Smets and Wouters (2003) for the euro area where, in the original set up, monetary policy behaviour is described...

This paper argues that EMU has been and continues to be a politically driven process. In this perspective, it examines the issues and the implications of potential Euroexit and Euro break up: it underlines that these processes would have a prominent political dimension, as was the case for the...

This study assesses the European Central Bank's (ECB) crisis management performance and potential for crisis resolution. The study investigates the institutional and functional constraints that delineate the ECB's scope for policy action under crisis conditions, and how the bank has actually...