Search Results
Journal Article
How do currency crises spread?
Journal Article
Government investment and the European stability and growth pact
The authors analyze whether it makes sense to treat public investment spending differently from other government spending when applying the deficit constraints mandated within the single European currency area. Given the low rates of population growth, mobility, and mortality in European countries, they find that excluding public investment from the computation of the deficit ceiling has only moderate implications for the current generations? spending choices. They also show that excluding net investment yields better outcomes than excluding gross investment.
Conference Paper
Banking regulation in the European Union: some issues and concerns
Working Paper
EMS interest rate differentials and fiscal policy: a model with an empirical application to Italy
This paper develops a model showing how EMS interest rate differentials are influenced by fiscal policy. For countries like Italy, with large budget deficits, the commitment to a stable EMS exchange rate can entail costly fiscal adjustment. If the government believes these costs to be excessive, it may choose to adopt a more inflationary monetary policy and realign periodically. It is this possibility that the policy of targeting the stable exchange rate will be abandoned in favor of one with periodic EMS realignments that contributes to the interest differential. ; Estimation of the model ...
Journal Article
Legal structure, financial structure, and the monetary policy transmission mechanism
Among the many challenges facing the new Eurosystem - the European Central Bank and the central banks of the eleven members of the European Monetary Union - is the possibility that participating countries will respond differently to interest rate changes. This paper provides evidence that differences in financial structure are the proximate cause for these national asymmetries in monetary policy transmission and that these differences in financial structure are a result of differences in legal structure. The author concludes that unless legal structures are harmonized across Europe, the ...
Working Paper
Technical trading rules in the European Monetary System
Using the genetic programming methodology developed in Neely, Weller and Dittmar (1997), we find trading rules that generate significant excess returns for three of four EMS exchange rates over the out-of-sample period 1986-1996. Permitting the rules to use information about the interest rate differential proved to be important. The reduction in volatility resulting from the imposition of a narrower band may reduce trading rule profitability. The currency for which there was least evidence of significant excess returns was the Dutch guilder, which was also the only currency that remained ...
Report
The transition to E.M.U.: structural and strategic aspects
The recurrent crises in the EMS have bolstered a lively debate about the transition to EMU. Indeed the political economy of regional integration is at odds with the theory of optimum currency areas. Essentially static and based on real criteria alone, the latter is not suited to deal with a process which has historical roots, political ends, real and nominal dimensions. The relevant concept is convergence. ; Part I first discusses the interplay of nominal and real convergence, then examines the structural and behavioural asymmetries between European countries. It shows why convergence is not ...
Working Paper
Monetary and financial integration in the EMU: Push or pull?
A number of studies have recently noted that monetary integration in the European Monetary Union (EMU) has been accompanied by increased financial integration. This paper examines the channels through which monetary union increased financial integration, using international panel data on bilateral international commercial bank claims from 1998-2006. I decompose the relative increase in bilateral commercial bank claims among union members following monetary integration into three possible channels: A "borrower effect," as a country's EMU membership may leave its borrowers more creditworthy ...