Mongelli, Francesco Paolo, Reinhold, Elisa, Papadopoulos, Georgios, (2016), “What’s so special about specialization in the euro area? – Early evidence of changing economic structures”, European Central Bank, Occasional Paper Series, No 168, February. Euro area countries exhibited modest convergence prior to the financial crisis and diverged thereafter. Such divergence has been examined from many angles, and various narratives of the crisis have developed. Surprisingly, the gradual transformation of the economic structures of euro area countries over …Read More

Dräger, Lena, Proaño, Christian R., (2016), “Cross-Border Banking and Business Cycles in Asymmetric Currency Unions”, IMK Working Paper, Nr. 161, January. Against the background of the emergence of macroeconomic imbalances within the European Monetary Union (EMU), we investigate in this paper the macroeconomic consequences of cross-border banking in monetary unions such as the euro area. For this purpose, we incorporate in an otherwise standard two-region monetary union DSGE model a global banking sector …Read More

Garcia-de-Andoain, Carlos, Heider, Florian, Hoerova, Marie, Manganelli, Simone, (2016), “Lending-of-last-resort is as lending-of-last-resort does: Central bank liquidity provision and interbank market functioning in the euro area“, European Central Bank Working Paper, No 1886, February. This paper investigates the impact of ample liquidity provision by the European Central Bank on the functioning of the overnight unsecured interbank market from 2008 to 2014. We use novel data on interbank transactions derived from TARGET2, the main euro area payment …Read More

Bénassy-Quéré, Agnès, Ragot, Xavier, Wolff, Guntram B., (2016), “Which fiscal union for the euro area?“, Bruegel Publications, Issue 2016/05, 18 February. At the current level of political and societal integration, a large federal budget is unrealistic in the euro area. The authors make three recommendations that would lead national fiscal policies to be more stabilising with respect to the economic cycle, while achieving long-term sustainability. They also recommend a move towards a European unemployment insurance scheme …Read More