Should a common central bank in a heterogeneous monetary union base its decisions on EU-wide averages of economic variables or on national welfare losses? A central bank that minimizes the sum of national welfare losses reacts less to common shocks. Under certain parameter constellations this...

Although designed to support monetary policy, two crucial aspects of the central bank framework can disconnect the monetary policy transmission: banks' access to central bank deposits and Quantitative Easing (QE). We show how both hinder the monetary policy transmission through the main...

Exchange market pressure (EMP) measures the pressure on a currency to depreciate. It adds to the actual depreciation a weighted combination of policy instruments used to ward off depreciation, such as interest rates and foreign exchange interventions, where the weights are their effectiveness....

We examine the implications of monetary union for macroeconomic stabilisation in catching up participating countries. We allow member states' supply conditions to differ inside the union, especially with regard to sectoral characteristics. Sectoral productivity shocks on balance hamper the...

Twenty years of euro history confirms the euro's stability and position as the second global currency. It also enjoys the support of majority of the euro area population and is seen as a good thing for the European Union. The European Central Bank has been successful in keeping inflation at a...

We study cross-country differences in monetary policy transmission across the large four euro-area countries (France, Germany, Italy and Spain) using a large Bayesian vector autoregressive model with endogenous prior selection. Drawing both on the posterior distributions of the cross-country...

This paper studies risk-taking by European banks. We construct a measure of risk-taking which relates changes in three month ahead expected credit standards for several non-financial private sector categories to risk of the macroeconomic environment banks operate in to reflect whether credit...

This paper studies the effect of a monetary policy shock in the euro area on the main Estonian economic and financial variables between 2000 and 2012. Using a standard structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model we find strong and persistent effects on Estonian GDP, private consumption,...

This paper provides a brief survey of the role of financial frictions in the monetary transmission mechanism. After noting some of the key stylised facts that any model of the transmission mechanism must be consistent with, we discuss both the classical interest rate channel and the credit and...