Russia's regions are heavily exposed to regional income shocks because of an uneven distribution of natural resources and a Soviet legacy of heavily skewed regional specialization. Also, Russia has a limited mobility of labour and lacks fiscal instruments to deal with regional shocks. We assess...

This paper models regional earnings and unemployment in the ten regions of Great Britain between 1972 and 1995, paying particular attention to their interaction and to the important influence of the housing market. In contrast to Blanchard and Katz (1992, 1997) for the United States, we find...

Inspired by the current debate over the future of the monetary union in Europe, this paper provides a simple model for the determination of the conditions of survival of the common good, which requires the creation of an effective fiscal union. We highlight the importance of institutional design...

We study the channels of interstate risk sharing in Germany for the time period 1970 to 2006, estimating the degrees of smoothing of a shock to a state’s gross domestic product by factor markets, the government sector, and credit markets, respectively. Within the government sector, we pay...

The paper studies a federal system where a region provides non-contractible essential inputs for the successful implementation of a local public policy project with spill-overs, and where bargaining between different levels of government may ensure efficient decision making ex post. We ask...

The paper considers the pros and cons for Canada of monetary union between Canada and the U.S. The current Canadian monetary arrangements, a flexible exchange rate and an inflation target, are contrasted both with a unilateral adoption by Canada of the U.S. dollar and with a full, formally...

In recent decades, the issues of federalism and political integration have gained prominence in public debate as well as in the academic realm. A frequently made point is that allowing free secession may protect the minority’s interests, thus providing it with an incentive to enter the...

As exemplified in the 1995 Mediterranean Declaration of the European Union, migration has become a major concern for European development policies. By enhancing socio-economic conditions through development cooperation, a reduction of South-North migration flows is envisaged. This new approach...

This paper analyzes the redistributive effects of the EU budget during the period 1986-97 and advances a proposal for setting member countries' budgetary balances in a manner consistent with a simple equity criterion based on relative income per capita.