Does one size fit all in the Euro Area? Some counterfactual evidence

This paper examines whether Euro Area countries would have faced a more favorable inflation output variability tradeoff without the Euro. We provide evidence that this claim is true for the periods of the Great Recession and the European Sovereign Debt Crisis. For the Euro Area as a whole, the deterioration of the tradeoff becomes insignificant with Draghi’s ‘whatever it takes’ announcement onwards. However, a more detailed analysis shows that the detrimental effect of the Euro is more severe and long-lasting for peripheral countries, pointing to structural differences among Euro Area countries as a key element of the detrimental effect of the Euro. We base our results on a novel empirical strategy that, consistently with monetary theory, models the joint determination of the variability of inflation and output conditional on structural supply shocks. Moreover, our findings are robust to potential endogeneity concerns related to adoption of the Euro.