This paper assesses how monetary authorities behave and how they interact. Pooled data for the 15 members of the European Union except Luxembourg and five other OECD countries serves to answer these questions. Three basic conclusions emerge. First, fiscal policy responds to the ratio of public...

Do plans for a monetary union in Europe call for limits on the freedom of the member countries to use fiscal policy? To provide a tentative answer, we simulate the IMF model MULTIMOD, given various shocks, in the case of a European Monetary Union consisting only of France and Germany. The...

What purpose does the European Monetary System serve? Who benefits from it? Is it a Deutschmark zone? Or could one argue that, despite the asymmetrical positions of France and Germany, the System does serve a certain collective interest? An attempt to answer these questions reveals a basic...

This paper explores the possible macroeconomic consequences of financial deregulation in an institutional environment where deregulation raises risks in banking. The central bank is assumed to maximize an objective function an argument of which is the probability of bank failure. It is then...

The discussion of monetary policy in France, which is intended for a chapter in a general handbook on monetary policy that will cover a number of other countries as well, begins with the early postwar period and carries the story up to the present. A separate section analyses the new framework...

This paper explores the hypothesis that the non-German members of the European Monetary System (EMS) draw benefits from the system because of the monetary discipline that it imposes upon them. The hypothesis explains the dominant position of Germany in the EMS and is consistent with the evidence...