The paper provides an overview of the sovereign debt crisis. I first consider the build-up of the crisis. I then discuss policy choices when a financial crisis erupts and assess the adjustment processes in the crisis countries, including alternatives to policies of austerity. Finally I take up...

The paper is a narrative on monetary policy and the banking sector during the two recent euro area recessions. It shows that while in the two episodes of recession and financial stress the ECB acted aggressively providing liquidity to the banking sector, the second recession, unlike the first,...

We analyze why the Eurozone crisis increasingly resembles Latin America’s lost decade instead of Asia’s phoenix miracle, emphasizing the roles of the real exchange rate, the external environment, and debt restructuring. In addition, we contrast the adjustment to housing bubbles in Ireland,...

In this article we study the resilience of the Portuguese labor market, in terms of job flows, employment and wage developments, in the context of the current recession. We single out the huge contribution of job destruction, especially due to the closing of existing firms, to the dramatic...

The nature of fiscal policies was changed dramatically by the creation of the Eurozone. While prior to the start of the Eurozone, national governments were sovereign in that they could back up the issue of debt by the issue of money, they lost this sovereignty in the Eurozone. This had dramatic...

This paper argues that in ebullient times equilibrium leverage and asset prices are too high; in bad times, equilibrium leverage and asset prices are too low. This is the leverage cycle. Looking at the recent American and European crises, the paper draws lessons for central banks about how to...

Most of the available literature on economic and monetary history deals with the advanced countries of Western Europe and the United States of America. The monetary and financial history of South-Eastern Europe, however, is still largely unexplored. So far, historical study of the monetary...

We examine the ability of large-scale vector autoregressions (VARs) to produce accurate macroeconomic (output and inflation) and credit (loans and lending rates) forecasts in Greece, during the latest sovereign debt crisis. We implement recently proposed Bayesian shrinkage techniques and we...

In this paper we estimate disaggregated labour demand equations using panel data involving observations across time (1970-2007) for twenty-three industries across eleven euro area countries. By using the EU KLEMS database, which provides data across countries, we provide industry-by-industry...

This paper investigates the inter-linkages between financial stability and fiscal policy. It analyzes the effect of selected financial stability indicators on the probability of future debt deterioration, controlling for several macroeconomic variables. We find significant evidence that a...