The official view on ECB monetary policy claims that monetary decisions are based solely on average data for the euro zone and that diverging regional developments are disregarded. However, experience from other two tier central banks and theoretical considerations suggest that this official...

We study the pass-through of exchange rate changes to consumer prices for the euro area by estimating vector error correction models for Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain. Using the weights of the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) we compute a weighted average of the...

The rest of this paper is set up as follows. In section 2 we provide a brief description of the ECB's comprehensive assessment of the European banking system. In section 3 we describe the data we are using and provide some descriptive statistics, particularly regarding the changes between the...