Although the European Central Bank (ECB) has been pursuing an aggressively expansionary policy since 2012, previously the ECB was behind the curve in lowering interest rates and making asset purchases to combat the prolonged euro area recession. This paper argues that part of the delay can be...

We analyze the economic performance of di§erent monetary policy strategies, or rules, in a low interest rate environment, using simulations with a DSGE model which has been estimated for the euro area. We study how often the e§ective lower bound of interest rates (ELB) is likely to bind, and...

The last review of the ECB’s monetary policy strategy in 2003 followed a period of predominantly upside risks to price stability. Experience following the 2008 financial crisis has focused renewed attention on the question of how monetary and fiscal policy should best interact, in particular...

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...

This paper studies monetary regime choice between monetary union and flexible exchange rate regime in a large open economy framework. The classical approach emphasizes that monetary unions are inherently costly because a single interest rate cannot respond effectively to different shocks of...

In the euro area, monetary policy is conducted by a single central bank for 19 member countries. However, countries are heterogeneous in their economic development, including their inflation rates. This paper combines a New Keynesian model and a neural network to assess whether the European...

We examine the credit channel of monetary policy from 2000 to 2015 in the Euro Area using daily monetary policy shock and credit risk measures in an autoregressive distributed lag model. We find that an expansionary monetary policy shock leads to a short-run increase in the credit risk of...

We study how monetary policy affects local market competition in a union of countries experiencing different economic conditions: the euro area. We find that when monetary conditions tighten (loosen), from the point of view of an individual economy, market concentration increases (declines)....

It is now a few years since the introduction of the common currency, and Europe is still experiencing high unemployment. The conventional logic attributes this problem to strong trade unions and other flaws in the labour market. This article takes a different approach. Using a game theoretic...

The likely extension of the euro area has triggered a debate on the organization of the ECB, in particular on the apparent mismatch between relative economic size and voting rights in the Council. We present a simple model of optimal representation in a federal central bank addressing this...