This study analyses the allocation of power in the Governing Council of the European Central Bank (ECB) as it enlarges to accommodate new members of the economic and monetary union. For this purpose, two classical power indices that have their origin in solutions to co-operative games are...

This paper empirically investigates the differences in the motives of raising privatisation proceeds for a panel of EU countries from 1990 to 2000. More specifically, we test whether privatisations can be mainly interpreted (a) as ingredients of a larger reform package of economic liberalisation...

The question as to whether and when the European Union should open accession negotiations with Turkey has given rise to a heated debate not just among the political and academic communities, but also among the European public at large. Whereas some expect major economic and geopolitical benefits...

According to the traditional 'optimum currency area' approach, not much will be lost from a very hard peg to a currency union if there has been little reason for variations in the exchange rate. This paper takes a different approach and highlights the fact that high exchange rate volatility may...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse the effect of financial integration on several macroeconomic variables from a global perspective. Design/methodology/approach – The authors apply a cointegrated vector autoregression model using quarterly data for 1980-2009. Analysing the...

In the debate on global imbalances, the euro area countries did not receive much attention so far. While the current account is on balance for the entire area, divergences between individual member states have increased since the introduction of the common currency. In this paper, the imbalances...

This study is motivated by the development of credit-related instruments and signals of stock price movements of large banks during the recent financial crisis. What is common to most of the empirical studies in this field is that they concentrate on modeling the conditional mean. However,...