The likely extension of the euro area has triggered a debate on the organization of the ECB, in particular on the apparent mismatch between relative economic size and voting rights in the Council. We present a simple model of optimal representation in a federal central bank addressing this...

This paper analyses which economic and political factors affect the chance that a country receives IMF credit or signs an agreement with the Fund. We use a panel model for 128 countries over the period 1972-1998. Our results, based on Extreme Bounds Analysis, suggest that it are mostly economic...

This paper provides textual evidence of Keynes's position on monetary policy and shaping international monetary relations. One result of my contribution is that the famous dichotomy rules versus discretion is of no relevance to his economic theory, because he used the term rules not in the...

In 1999, eleven European countries formed the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU); they abandoned their national currencies and adopted a new common currency, the euro. Several recent papers argue that the introduction of the euro has led (by itself) to a sizable and statistically significant...

Microfoundations of the euro's effect on euro area trade hinge on the timing, the speed and the size of adjustment in trade costs. We estimate timing, speed and size of adjustment in trade costs for sectoral trade data. Our approach allows for sector specific impacts of trade costs on sectoral...

Recent research suggests that adopting a common currency increases bilateral trade. In this paper, I explore experiences of currency union entry in the post-war period and find no effect on trade. Previous results derived from a large panel data set (covering more than 200 countries from 1948...

We develop a simple model that looks at the incentives of private banks to behave prudentially and undertake costly efforts to lower the probability of bankruptcy or having to be bailed out by a lender of last resort. Government regulators can force banks to increase efforts beyond the privately...

Optimum Currency Area (OCA) theory proves inadequate in the analysis of the new regional monetary integration schemes that have sprung up among developing and emerging market economies since the 1990s. Building on the concept of original sin developed by Eichengreen et al. we argue that a...

This paper investigates to what extent Chinese monetary policy is constrained by the dollar peg. To this end, we use a cointegration framework to examine whether Chinese interest rates are driven by the Fed's policy. In a second step, we estimate a monetary model for China, in which we include...