The financial crisis has highlighted the need for models that can identify counter-party risk exposures and shock transmission processes at the systemic level. We use the euro area financial accounts (flow of funds) data to construct a sector-level network of bilateral balance sheet exposures...

We use industry valuation differentials across European countries to study the impact of membership in the European Union as well as the Eurozone on economic and financial integration. In integrated markets, discount rates and expected growth opportunities should be similar within one industry,...

Shifts in equity turnover happen on and around holidays because rationally bounded investors become distracted. Their pattern reveals a persistent equity home bias even in the Eurozone, a stress test case for the survival of this bias given the high level of economic and financial development...

We investigate the relationship of the market pricing of sovereign risk to default, through CDS spreads for 16 Eurozone countries during 2008q1-2013q3. We take into account, through appropriate non-linear GMM estimations the endogeneity problem. We focus on “fiscal space” (DEBT or FISCAL),...

We examine how euro conversion affected trading costs and volume in European equity markets. Euro conversion immediately changed tick sizes and price transparency, both of which could affect trading costs and relative trading volume. Longer-run, conversion could boost competition among...

This paper expands the growing literature on common safe assets in the context of the euro area financial system by employing credit risk simulation techniques to investigate the properties of different safe asset models and their impact on national bond markets. The paper explores in particular...

In this paper we assess the movements of euro area sovereign bond yield spreads vis-àvis the German Bund as processes specified across different levels of volatility and subject to movements in asset prices and economic conditions. The determinants we use are grouped into domestic and euro-area...

This paper proposes a new mutual exciting regime-switching model where crises can spread contagiously across countries. Each country has its own hidden stochastic process that determines whether it is in a normal or crisis regime. The mutual-excitation component allows interactions in the Markov...

This paper analyzes the causes of the sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone and examines the policy alternatives confronting euro area governments. It suggests that pooling fiscal risks, creating an EU Treasury and issuing jointly-backed euro bonds is an optimal solution and the inevitable...

The process of European integration has gained considerable momentum during the past couple of years. This paper provides an assessment of the degree of integration of both the accession states of central and eastern Europe and of the pre-ins for monetary union with respect to Germany. Using...