The purpose of this article is to examine the relationship between retail prices of petrol, international oil prices and tax rates in Greece. We examine not only the hypothesis that retail prices act asymmetrically to crude oil price changes and the pass-through rates of tax increases, but also...

We discuss the origins of the Greek financial crisis as manifested in the growing fiscal and current-account deficits since euro-area entry in 2001. We then provide an investigation of spreads on Greek relative to German long-term government debt. Using monthly data over the period 2000 to 2010,...

We discuss the origins of the Greek financial crisis as manifested in the growing fiscal and current-account deficits since euro-area entry in 2001. We then provide an investigation of spreads on Greek relative to German long-term government debt. Using monthly data over the period 2000 to 2010,...

We investigate the impact of the economic fundamentals, sovereign credit ratings, political uncertainty, and the ECB’s Securities Markets Program (SMP) on Greek sovereign spreads. Our findings show that sovereign downgrades and political uncertainty appear to have been drivers of the sharp...

In this paper we construct Financial Conditions Indices (FCIs) for the euro area, for the period 2003 to 2011, using a wide range of prices, quantities, spreads and survey data, grounded in the theoretical literature. One FCI includes monetary policy variables, while two versions of the FCI...

This paper examines questions related to possible capital account liberalisation in the Mediterranean countries. First, we provide an overview of the extent to which these countries have capital controls along with their exchange rate regimes and some basic macroeconomic aggregates. Second, we...