The so-called Troika, consisting of the EU-Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), was supposed to support the member states of the euro area which had been hit hard by a sovereign debt crisis. For that purpose, economic adjustment programs were...

We assess monetary convergence preceding the implementation of the European Monetary Union (EMU) through Kalman filtering estimates of the risk premium of eleven forward exchange rates of European and non-European currencies. Since all participating currencies are in effect identical from...

This paper analyzes reforms and adjustments in the context of the Euro and the global financial crises. Taking the perspective of the evolutionary approach to institutions, the formation of a new currency area is not unidirectional. The process leading to the euro is an example of a common...

The establishment of a Capital Markets Union (CMU) is a high-priority project of the European Commission. CMU should foster additional non-bank sources of finance, mobilize private savings more efficiently and enhance capital market integration. Although more integration is needed, the...

Yet another rescue plan for the European Monetary Union (EMU) is making its way through central Europe, but no one is foolish enough to believe that it will be enough. Greece's finance minister reportedly said that his nation cannot continue to service its debt, and hinted that a 50 percent...

For hundreds of years, European states have waged war with one another. Only since the XIX century, more than 40 wars (including 3 global wars) have devastated the continent and decimated its population. The European Union has provided the longest period of peace and prosperity that the citizens...

The Brexit issue has caused much concern regarding the future economic scenario of Europe in particular and the world in general. There are several reasons for Brexit. One of them is that the very nature of Monetary Unions is its rigidity. The 'one size fits all' yardstick won't apply to many...

This paper quantifies the economic influence that shocks to EMU cohesion, which in turn reflect the incomplete nature of the monetary union, have on the rest of the world. Disentangling euro area stress shocks and global risk aversion shocks based on a combination of sign, magnitude and...

We propose a novel metric to evaluate price developments within the euro area (EA), which involves the decomposition of the overall variability of cross country inflation rates into common and idiosyncratic labor cost and markup components. The analysis yields several interesting results. First,...