This paper analyzes the interest rate setting of the European Central Bank (ECB) both before and after the outbreak of the global financial crisis. In the current monetary policy literature, researchers typically select one Taylor rule-based model in order to analyze the interest rate setting of...

The last twenty years have brought a bulk of inconsistent results on the determinants of business cycle synchronization (BCS). Researchers have usually focused their attention on a limited set of possible determinants, not accounting for model uncertainty. For these reasons, Bayesian Model...

Between 1999 and the onset of the economic crisis in 2008 real ex-change rates in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain appreciated relative to the rest of the euro area. This divergence in competitiveness was reflected in the emergence of current account imbalances. Given that exchange...

Between 1999 and the onset of the economic crisis in 2008 real exchange rates in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain appreciated relative to the rest of the euro area. This divergence in competitiveness was reflected in the emergence of current account imbalances. Given that exchange rate...

This paper contributes to the understanding of the international financial linkages created by US banks by looking at the geographical composition and structure of the balance sheet of foreign branches. The empirical investigation, which is based on a novel dataset containing balance sheet...

The measures implemented to reduce current account deficits within several euro area econ-omies are aimed at boosting competitiveness to raise exports. Due to low industrial capacities in Greece, Portugal and Spain, for instance, it is questionable, however, whether exports can contribute much...

We assess the sustainability of the current account (CA) balance, net international investment position (NIIP) and net external debt (NED) in a sample of EU countries using two complementary approaches. First, we employ both time-series and panel-data stationarity tests of current account...

We estimate a panel VAR model for the euro area to quantitatively assess how the uneven recourse of national banking systems in the euro area to the ECB's unconventional refinancing operations that led to the accumulation of large TARGET2 balances, has contributed to the propagation of different...

The euro area periphery countries and the Baltic countries, which had large current account deficits in the run-up to the crisis, needed adjustment of relative prices to achieve both internal and external balances. Thus far, tangible progress has been made through lower wages and/or higher...

The objective of this paper is to explore the consequences of the correction of Euro area trade imbalances on real exchange rates. This analysis requires one additional dimension with respect to the standard Global Imbalances framework à la Obstfeld and Rogoff (2005), since the adjustment takes...