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Schlagwörter:
policy paradigm; critical junctures; European Central Bank; crisis management
Zusammenfassung:
Focusing on the experience of the euro area in general, and the ECB in particular, this article argues that in the context of explosive financial crises a phase of emergency crisis management precedes the phase of purposeful institution building. Importantly for our understanding of policy change, crisis management measures create their own path dependencies. However, albeit often improvised, crisis management decisions are not entirely contingent. The article therefore introduces the notion of preparedness, which measures the extent to which the pre-crisis policy paradigm was prepared for the joint occurrence of, in this case, a systemic banking crisis and a sovereign debt crisis. The analysis shows that the Euro area's lack of preparedness caused the ECB to assume a dominant position in the euro area during the emergency phase of the crisis. This windfall gain in power for the ECB has already begun to shape the future institutional architecture of the EMU.
