It is common knowledge that Small and Medium enterprises make up the backbone of the Greek economy. Nowadays during the greatest post war financial crisis, the fund availability critically determines the survival and the development of almost every enterprise. In the first part of this...

The paper deals with the geographies of the European economic crisis that had its origins in the global financial crisis of 2008-09. The crisis pushed many European economies into a deep recession and caused a mass unemployment in many countries. The crisis is analysed in a monetary economy...

This paper proposes a general statistical framework for systemic financial stress indexes. Several existing index designs can be represented as special cases. We introduce a daily variant of the ECB's CISS for the euro area and the US. The CISS aggregates a representative set of stress...

The primary goal of the European Central Bank’s (ECB) monetary policy is to achieve price stability. Whereas during the 1980s and 1990s there was a rapid and strong convergence in terms of price differential among the Euro countries, particularly in those countries with higher inflation rates...

Despite major recent advance in the literature on financial crises, the key role of central banks in financial crises is still not well understood. Our aim is to contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics of financial crises by explicitly modeling the strategic options of both traders...

Within the context of an agent-based macroeconomic model with dynamic bounded-rational expectations, the most important transmission links between the real sphere of the European economy and the US financial markets crises are simulated: (a) the devaluation of financial assets, (b) global...

The interplay between banks and the macroeconomy is of key importance for financial and economic stability. We analyze this link using a Factor Augmented Vector Autoregressive Model (FAVAR) which extends a standard VAR for the U.S. macroeconomy with a set of factors summarizing conditions in the...

We analyze the ECB Governing Council's voting procedures. The literature has by now discussed numerous aspects of the rotation model but does not account for many institutional aspects of the voting procedure of the GC. Using the randomization scheme based on the multilinear extension (MLE) of...

In this paper we examine whether publishing the information underlying the central bank's decisions is socially desirable. We show that opacity may lead to the same equilibrium as transparency. However, additional equilibria may emerge under opacity with adverse consequences for welfare....

The appropriate design of monetary policy in integrated financial markets is one of the most challenging areas for central banks. One hot topic is whether the rise in liquidity in recent years has contributed to the formation of price bubbles in asset markets. If strong linkages exist, the...