In discussions of the likely implications for Europe of EMU, the United States is often cited as an example of a monetary union, while the United States' central bank, the Federal Reserve System, is cited as a model for how a central bank would function in a monetary union. While the costs and...

The European Central Bank president and Minneapolis Fed President Gary Stern discuss ECB accomplishments and challenges, as well as issues of concern to both central banks.

The pact to ensure fiscal stability in Europe's monetary union might soon be loosened. Not good, say economists at the Minneapolis Fed

During the 1980s, policy advisers were successful in promoting the view that movements in the value of the dollar have an inverse relationship to U.S. international competitiveness. This article explains their hypothesis, as well as the counterargument that exchange rates positively reflect a...

This article presents a new type of business-cycle index that allows for cycle-to-cycle comparisons of the depth of recessions within a country, cross-country comparisons of business-cycle correlation and simple aggregation to arrive at a measure of a European business cycle. The paper examines...

This paper attempts to bridge the gap between the theoretical literature examining how innovation affects income across countries and the empirical literature examining how relative wages within a country change over time. We test the hypothesis that the relative wage between workers in high-and...

The effect of the unification of the European banking market on the efficiency of the allocation of capital across Europe depends on the economic forces behind banking structure. Such forces are not well understood. The paper discusses a conceptual framework for analyzing financial services...