The Introduction of the Euro and Economic Growth: some Panel Data Evidence

We use a difference in difference estimation framework to analyse the effects of the adoption of the euro on the level of per capita GDP for a sample of seventeen European countries (the EU15 plus Norway and Iceland) over the period 1990\u20132010. We find that the adoption of the euro may have raised the level of per capita GDP (and labour productivity) by about 4 percent. There is also some evidence that the impact of the euro has been smaller in the case of countries with a high debt-to-GDP ratio in 1999 when the euro was introduced. Results are robust to controlling for country fixed effects, time trends and to estimation strategies that control for cross-country parameter heterogeneity