The ECB has announced that when government and corporate bonds come to maturity in the context of its QE-program, new bonds will be bought in the market so as to keep the money stock (money base) unchanged. This creates a "window of opportunities" for the ECB. It could replace the old bonds with...

We investigate how public opinion along with the electoral process affect the strength of environmental fiscal policies in the European Union (EU). Our analysis accounts for a set of economic, institutional, and political factors that can affect environmental taxes and expenditures. We pursue a...

In monetary policy strategies geared towards maintaining price stability conditional and unconditional forecasts of inflation and output play an important role. In this paper we illustrate how modern sticky-price dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models, estimated using Bayesian...

Against the background of the recent housing boom and bust in countries such as Spain and Ireland, we investigate in this paper the macroeconomic consequences of cross-border banking in monetary unions such as the euro area. For this purpose, we incorporate in an otherwise standard two-region...

Against the background of the recent housing boom and bust in countries such as Spain and Ireland, we investigate in this paper the macroeconomic consequences of cross-border banking in monetary unions such as the euro area. For this purpose, we incorporate in an otherwise standard two-region...

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...

We examine the indicator property of the monetary indicator for inflation. Using a P*-model, Svensson shows theoretically in a recent paper that the relationship between these two variables is rather tenuous. The present study employs empirical evidence on the relations in his model to quantify...

The pending enlargement of the European Monetary Union (EMU) has brought to the fore the discussion of the voting right distribution in the European Central Bank (ECB) council. We show that, in a model where labor unions internalize the inflationary consequences of wage setting, deviating from a...