One of the main contributions of Modern Money Theory (MMT) has been to explain why monetarily sovereign governments have a very flexible policy space that is unconstrained by hard financial limits. Not only can they issue their own currency to pay public debt denominated in their own currency,...

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...

Economists and policy-makers have long sought the ideal framework for monetary policy as it is arguably one of the most important tools for government to influence the economy. Exchange rate and inflation are believed to be the most appealing anchors for providing guidance to the conduct of...

Austria, Finland and Sweden became members of the EU in 1995. This paper examines how support for the euro and trust in the European Central Bank (ECB) have evolved in these three countries since their introduction at the turn of the century. Support for the euro in the two euroarea members...

Is central bank transparency associated with variation in macroeconomic outcomes? Cross-country data covering 87 countries is used to construct an index for transparency based upon the detail in central banks' published forecasts. After controlling for a number of other institutional and...

The present paper contains a brief presentation and analysis, in a historical perspective through the lens of the recent major crises, of the legal framework governing the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), as well as current developments and challenges ahead. It is structured in three...

We conduct a systematic analysis of the costs and benefits of large-scale securities purchases, using the Federal Reserve's QE4 program as a concrete example. This program was initiated at the onset of the pandemic in March 2020 and continued for two years, leading to a doubling of the Fed's...

Many central banks discuss the introduction of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). Empirical evidence suggests that households may differ in their willingness to hold CBDC. Against this background, this paper investigates the macroeconomic effects of different CBDC regimes in a New Keynesian...

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...