In this paper we investigate whether banks that borrow from other banks have lower risk levels. We concentrate on a large sample of Central and Eastern European banks which allows us to explore the impact of interbank lending when exposures are long-term and interbank borrowers are small banks....

We analyse the performance of budgetary and growth forecasts of all stability and convergence programmes submitted by EU member states over the last decade. Differences emerge for the bias in budgetary projections across countries. As a second step we explore whether economic, political and...

The recent debate over monetary policy strategies concludes that monetary targeting and inflation targeting in practice lead to very similar patterns of central bank behavior. This raises the question why central banks insist on the strategies they use. In this paper, we develop an answer from...

Fiscal rules, such as the excessive deficit procedure and the stability and growth pact (SGP), aim at constraining government behaviour. Milesi-Ferretti (2003) develops a model in which governments circumvent such rules by reverting to creative accounting. The amount of this creative accounting...

We analyze the implications of financial openness to macroeconomic volatility in a small open economy. Major macroeconomic aggregates show non-monotonic volatility patterns with respect to the degree of financial openness in the model without domestic financial frictions. The introduction of...

We address an important business cycle fact, i.e., the amplified and hump-shaped responses of output to productivity shocks, in a dynamic general equilibrium model with financial frictions. Models with financial frictions in the current literature have either the amplification mechanism or the...