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Discussion Paper
Foreign Borrowing in the Euro Area Periphery: The End Is Near
Current account deficits in euro area periphery countries have now largely disappeared. This represents a substantial adjustment. Only two years ago, deficits stood at nearly 10 percent of GDP in Greece and Portugal and 5 percent in Spain and Italy (see chart below). This sharp narrowing means that spending has been brought in line with income, largely righting an imbalance that had left these countries dependent on heavy foreign borrowing. However, adjustment has come at a sizable cost to growth, with lower domestic spending only partly offset by higher export sales. Downward pressure on ...
Discussion Paper
How Have the Euro Area and U.S. Labor Market Recoveries Differed?
The initial phase of the pandemic saw the euro area and U.S unemployment rates behave quite differently, with the rate for the United States rising much more dramatically than the euro area rate. Two years on, the rates for both regions are back near pre-pandemic levels. A key difference, though, is that U.S. employment levels were down by 3.0 million jobs in 2021:Q4 relative to pre-pandemic levels, while the number of euro area jobs was up 600,000. A look at employment by industry shows that both regions had large shortfalls in the accommodation and food services industries, as expected. A ...
Working Paper
Delphic and Odyssean Monetary Policy Shocks: Evidence from the Euro Area
We use financial intraday data to identify monetary policy surprises in the euro area. We find that monetary policy statements and press conferences after European Central Bank (ECB) Governing Council meetings convey information that moves the yield curve far out. Moreover, the nature of the information revealed in a narrow window around these statements and press conferences evolved over time. Until 2013, unexpected variations in future interest rates were positively correlated with the changes in market-based measure of inflation expectations consistent with news on future macroeconomic ...
Discussion Paper
The Different Paths of Greece and Spain to High Unemployment
Euro area GDP remains below its 2007 level due to the global financial meltdown and the subsequent sovereign debt crisis in the periphery countries. Unemployment rates make it clear that some countries have fared much worse than others—the rates in Spain and Greece today are over 25 percent and are much higher than rates in the next highest, Portugal (15.7 percent), and in the euro area (11.6 percent). Quite a change from 2007, when Spain and Greece had lower unemployment rates than the euro area as a whole. In this post, we show that while the unemployment rates in the two countries are ...
Discussion Paper
Do Economic Crises in Europe Affect the U.S.? Some Lessons from the Past Three Decades
In this post we summarize the main results of our contribution to a recent e-book, “The Making of the European Monetary Union: 30 years since the ERM crisis,” on the economic and financial crises in Europe since 1992-93, and focus on the spillovers of those crises onto the United States and the global economy. We find that the answer to the question in the title of this post is a (moderate) yes.
Report
Trade invoicing in the accession countries: are they suited to the Euro?
Countries aspiring to join the euro area-the so-called accession countries-are increasingly binding their economic activity, external and internal, to the euro-area countries. This phenomenon is observed in the currency invoicing of international trade transactions, where accession countries have reduced their use of the U.S. dollar in invoicing such transactions. According to theory, the optimal invoicing choice for an accession country depends on its composition of exports and imports and on the macroeconomic fluctuations faced by its trade partners, with both factors bearing out the role ...
Journal Article
The balance of payments crisis in the euro area periphery
Countries in the euro area periphery borrowed heavily from abroad in the years leading up to the sovereign debt crisis, largely to finance increased consumption and housing investment. When the crisis hit in 2010, capital flight by private investors forced these countries to bring domestic spending back into line with domestic incomes?the same adjustment required of countries facing a typical balance of payments crisis. Nevertheless, adjustment to the pullback of private capital was not as harsh as might have been expected, owing to the workings of the euro area?s system for managing ...
Report
Money, credit, monetary policy, and the business cycle in the euro area: what has changed since the crisis?
This paper studies the relationship between the business cycle and financial intermediation in the euro area. We establish stylized facts and study their stability during the global financial crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis. Long-term interest rates have been exceptionally high and long-term loans and deposits exceptionally low since the Lehman collapse. Instead, short-term interest rates and short-term loans and deposits did not show abnormal dynamics in the course of the financial and sovereign debt crisis.
Discussion Paper
An Overlooked Factor in Banks’ Lending to Minorities
In the second quarter of 2022, the homeownership rate for white households was 75 percent, compared to 45 percent for Black households and 48 percent for Hispanic households. One reason for these differences, virtually unchanged in the last few decades, is uneven access to credit. Studies have documented that minorities are more likely to be denied credit, pay higher rates, be charged higher fees, and face longer turnaround times compared to similar non-minority borrowers. In this post, which is based on a related Staff Report, we show that banks vary substantially in their lending to ...
Working Paper
Should the ECB Adjust Its Strategy in the Face of a Lower r*?
We address the question in this paper’s title using an estimated New Keynesian DSGE model of the euro area with trend inflation, imperfect indexation, and a lower bound on the nominal interest rate. In this setup, a decrease in the steady-state real interest rate, r*, increases the probability of hitting the lower bound constraint, which entails significant welfare costs and warrants an adjustment of the monetary policy strategy. Under an unchanged monetary policy rule, an increase in the inflation target of eight-tenths the size of the drop in the real natural rate of interest is ...