A European unemployment insurance scheme has gained increased attention as a new and ambitious common fiscal instrument which could be used for temporary cross-country transfers. Part of the national stabilizers composing unemployment insurance schemes would be transferred to the central level. Unemployed are then insured by both layers. When a country is hit by an asymmetric shock, it would receive ...
Owner-occupied housing costs represent an important expenditure for households and should be included in the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices. Conceptual and practical challenges must be resolved before this can be implemented. Estimates suggest that these costs would have a small impact on monetary policy. At the same time, different degrees of home ownership in the euro area mean that their inclusion ...
Given its central role in public accountability and in the formation of expectations, it is important to reflect on ways to improve the ECB’s communication policy. Communication should not generally strive for maximum transparency. The optimum degree of transparency varies between different aspects of monetary policy and banking supervision. Although the ECB already communicates very openly with the ...
We analyse the first twenty years of the euro both from an economic and an institutional perspective. We find that in particular during the period since the financial crisis, convergence as measured by a variety of indicators has not improved. Design flaws in the Eurozone institutional architecture have contributed importantly to this lack of convergence. This is why further reforms are urgently needed. ...
We propose a new instrument to identify uncertainty shocks in a SVAR model with external instruments. The instrument is constructed by exploiting variations in the price of gold around events that capture periods of changes in uncertainty. The variations in the price of gold around the events correlate with the underlying uncertainty shocks, due to the perception of gold as a safe haven asset. To control ...
