While a widespread consensus exists among macroeconomists that the German labour market reforms in 2003-2005 have successfully contributed to the decline of the unemployment rate, critics claim that the reforms led to wage restraint and consequently consumption dampening accompanied by...

This paper describes how the global financial crisis of 2007-2010 impacted trade both globally and more specifically for the European emerging economies, which in terms of GDP decline, were the most negatively impacted economies in the world. Just as with GDP, the trade of the European emerging...

The article presents the brief overview of the results of privatization in Russia during the period from 1995 to 2013. The privatization of the largest state companies is covered, large-scale privatization deals of the last two years are considered as highly efficient. The paper provides the...

This paper investigates China's role in creating global imbalances, and the related call for a massive renminbi revaluation as a (supposed) panacea to forestall their reemergence as the world economy recovers from severe crisis. We reject the prominence widely attributed to China as a cause of...

On February 3-4, 2016 SUERF – The European Money and Finance Forum –, Deutsche Bundesbank and Stiftung Geld und Währung jointly organized a Colloquium/Conference in Frankfurt in order to evaluate the experience with the SSM – the Single Supervisory Mechanism – during the first year of...

The unexpected outcome of the Brexit vote in June 2016 provides a rare macroeconomic experiment to study the aggregate consequences of a sudden change in expectations regarding future economic prospects. Using synthetic control methods, we show that forward looking households and businesses...

This paper presents an independent evaluation of the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council (IFAC) carried out in 2015. IFAC was set up as an independent fiscal institution in 2011 to monitor the fiscal policy of the Irish government. Similar fiscal "watchdogs" have emerged across Europe following the...

What are the macroeconomic implications of changes in sovereign risk premia? In this paper, I use a novel identification strategy coupled with a new dataset for the Euro Area to answer this question. I show that exogenous innovations in sovereign risk premia were an important driver of the...

The energy shocks of the 1970's had significant effects on the global economy. Were they engineered by an effective cartel of OPEC members acting to share the market by controlling output and influencing market prices? If OPEC was an effective cartel sharing the market among its members, there...

Nicholas Kaldor and Kazimierz Łaski have been two very prominent exponents of Keynesian thinking. They both contributed to the debate on European economic integration, one (Nicholas Kaldor) in the early 1970s, when there were fierce debates about the United Kingdom's entry to the European...