We take stock of the history of the European Monetary Union and pegged exchange-rate regimes in recent decades. The post-Bretton Woods greater financial integration and under-regulated financial intermediation have increased the cost of sustaining a currency area and other forms of fixed...

Greater financial integration between core and peripheral EMU members not only had an effect on both sets of countries but also spilled over beyond the euro area. Lower interest rates allowed peripheral countries to run bigger deficits, which inflated their economies by allowing credit booms....

In this paper I focus on two specific hazard areas in the transition from Stage Two to Stage Three of European economic and monetary union (EMU), as well as on some key problems of Stage Three that EMU's monetary and fiscal structures appear ill-prepared to handle. The transitional hazards are...

In this paper, we present a spatial equilibrium model where search frictions hinder the immediate reallocation of workers both within and across local labour markets. Because of the frictions, firms and workers find themselves in bilateral monopoly positions when determining wages. Although...

This paper studies how capital market imperfections affect the welfare effects of forming a currency union. The analysis considers a bank-only world where intermediaries compete in Cournot fashion and monitoring and state verification are costly. The first part determines the credit market...

This paper studies the welfare effects of financial integration in the presence of moral hazard. Entrepreneurs face a trade off between risk and return. Banks may mitigate the resultant excessive risk by costly monitoring, where greater risk reduction requires more resources devoted to risk...

The ebb and flow of international capital since the nineteenth century illustrates recurring difficulties, as well as the alternative perspectives from which policymakers have tried to confront them. This paper is devoted to documenting these vicissitudes quantitatively and explaining them....