This paper investigates the causes behind the euro debt crisis, particularly Germany's role in it. It is argued that the crisis is not primarily a "sovereign debt crisis" but rather a (twin) banking and balance of payments crisis. Intra-area competitiveness and current account imbalances, and...

Since its inception, EMU adequacy to be an Optimal Currency Area was questioned, and, along with it, the homogeneous transmission of the monetary impulses across the Eurozone. Adopting a Bayesian Time-Varying parameter FAVAR model that fixes the flaws present in the existing literature and...

Re-coinage implies that old coins are declared invalid and exchanged for new ones at fixed exchange rates and dates. Empirical evidence shows that re-coinage could occur as often as twice a year within a currency area in the Middle Ages. The exchange fee at re-coinage worked as a monetary tax...

Archaeology and numismatics have long been familiar with the phenomenon of periodic re-coinage (renovatio monetae), which dominated monetary taxation in medieval Europe for almost 200 years. However, this form of monetary taxation is seldom, if ever, discussed in the literature of economics or...

Recently in this journal, Gonçalves and Carvalho (2009) concluded that inflation targeters were able to bring inflation down at less cost than nontargeters (p. 242). This comment shows that their conclusion is not robust, but instead is the result of comparing a particular subset of IT...

The cash strapped Turkey's gloomy economy was already ailing before the emergence of COVID-19 pandemic. The August rout of 2018 caused serious cracks as lira tumbled against the dollar (25% in three days and 41% in just two weeks); consequently, core inflation peaked at 26% and key interest rate...

When the global economy hit the wall in 2007-08 (i.e. sub-prime mortgage debacle in 2006 followed by the 2008 global credit mayhem, originated in the U.S. before spreading to Europe as sovereign debt crisis), an extensive research by economists, scholars and academia compared and contrasted the...

Monetary policy space remains constrained by the lower bound in many countries, limitingthe policy options available to address future deflationary shocks. The existence of cashprevents central banks from cutting interest rates much below zero. In this paper, we considerthe practical feasibility...

This article examines the benefits of CFA zone's membership by estimating the effects of joining the CFA zone on GDP per capita and other macroeconomic fundamentals in Mali. Using the synthetic control method (SCM), we show that Mali's CFA membership has a positive effect on its income,...

The prolonged crisis exposed the vulnerability of a monetary union without a banking union. The Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM), which started operating in November 2014, is an essential step towards restoring banks to health and rebuilding trust in the banking system. The ECB is today...