The paper addresses the question what effects the enlargement of a monetary union will have on necessary structural reforms in the (low distortion) member countries and the (high distortion) candidate countries. While monetary union lowers reforms in the candidate countries, members of the...

It is widely debated whether a monetary union has to be accompanied by a fiscal transfer scheme to accommodate asymmetric shocks. We build a model of a monetary union with a central bank and two heterogeneous countries that are linked by a fiscal transfer scheme with repercussions on monetary...

The pending enlargement of the European Monetary Union (EMU) has brought to the fore the discussion of the voting right distribution in the European Central Bank (ECB) council. We show that, in a model where labor unions internalize the inflationary consequences of wage setting, deviating from a...

The belief that the ECB follows the US Federal Reserve in setting its policy is so entrenched with market participants and commentators that the search for empirical support would seem to be a trivial task. However, this is not the case. We find that the ECB is indeed often influenced by the...

The paper addresses the question what effects the enlargement of a monetary union will have on necessary structural refoms in the (low distortion) member countries and the (high distortion) candidate country. While monetary union lowers reforms in the candidate country, members of the monetary...