During the European sovereign debt crisis, most countries that ran into fiscal trouble had Catholic majorities, whereas countries with Protestant majorities were able to avoid fiscal problems. Survey data show that, within Germany, views on theeuro differ between Protestants and Non-Protestants,...

During the European sovereign debt crisis, most countries that ran into fiscal trouble had Catholic majorities, whereas countries with Protestant majorities were able to avoid fiscal problems. Survey data show that, within Germany, views on the euro differ between Protestants and...

During the European sovereign debt crisis, most countries that ran into fiscal trouble had Catholic majorities, whereas countries with Protestant majorities were able to avoid fiscal problems. Survey data show that, within Germany, views on the euro differ between Protestants and...

The paper considers some of the issues emerging from the discrete wavelet analysis of popular bivariate spectral quantities such as the coherence and phase spectra and the frequency-dependent time delay. The approach utilised here is based on the maximal overlap discrete Hilbert wavelet...

Will EMU accelerate or retard structural reform in labour and product markets? The theoretical literature is ambiguous. New descriptive evidence provided in this paper suggests that euro-area countries have made relatively good progress in structural reform. However, it is much less clear...

Against the background of increasing competition and other significant structural changes implied by globalisation, maintaining and enhancing competitiveness has evolved into one of the prime concerns in most countries. Following up on previous work (see in particular ECB Occasional Papers No....

In recent years, the role attached to the autonomous components of aggregate demand has attracted rising attention, as testified by the development of the Sraffian Supermulti plier model (SSM) and the attempts to include autonomous demand in the Neo-Kaleckian model. This paper reviews and...

We examine the trajectories of the real unit labour costs (RULCs) in a selection of Eurozone economies. Strong asymmetries in the convergence process of the RULCs and its components-real wages, capital intensity, and technology-are uncovered through decomposition and cluster analyses. In the...

This paper examines the occurrence of structural breaks in European unemployment associated with major events experienced by the European economies at an institutional level: the creation of the European and Monetary Union (EMU) in 1999, and the Euro/financial crisis in 2008-2009, which was...

This paper investigates determinants of convergence in GDP per capita in the euro area and the EU between 1995 and 2021. It finds that the COVID-19 crisis temporarily slowed convergence but the estimated negative impact is significantly smaller than during the global financial crisis. Diverging...