The paper considers the issue of whether a supranational fiscal policy in Europe is needed, and, if so what responsibilities it should undertake. The literature on endogenous growth and the principle of subsidiarity suggest that such a policy should be limited to externalities or economies of...

This paper reviews the accumulated theory and evidence on the sources of European underperformance in terms of economic growth and unemployment. It takes the view that the main problem lies with labor market institutions, ranging from negotiation structures to hiring and firing costs,...

The international press has recently reported on the widely-held view in the financial markets that the movement of the Belgian industrial confidence indicator might precede the euro area business cycles. The initial purpose of this paper is to assess whether this market perception is more than...

This paper proposes a methodology to analyze the implications of the Advanced Measurement Approach (AMA) for the assessment of operational risk put forward by the Basel II Accord. The methodology relies on an integrated procedure for the construction of the distribution of aggregate losses,...

In this paper, we analyze wether the sensitivity of credit spread changes to financial and macroeconomic variables depends on bond characteristics such as rating and maturity. First, we estimate the term structure of credit spreads for different rating categories by applying an extension of the...

This paper estimates a DSGE model with many types of shocks and frictions for both the US and the euro area economy over a common sample period (1974-2002). The structural estimation methodology allows us to investigate whether differences in business cycle behaviour are due to differences in...

This paper documents patterns of price setting at the retail level in the euro area, summarized in six stylized facts. First, the average euro area monthly frequency of price adjustment is 15 p.c., compared to about 25 p.c. in the US. Second, the frequency of price changes is characterized by...

In the context of a first Working Paper the authors argued that electricity has a number of characteristics that set it apart from other commodities. It was demonstrated that some of these characteristics might complicate the deregulation process. This paper analyses the ongoing deregulation...

We present, extend and estimate a model of international trade with firm heterogeneity in the tradition of Melitz (2003) and Melitz and Ottaviano (2005). The model is constructed to yield testable implications for the dynamics of international prices, productivity levels and markups as functions...