This paper analyzes reforms and adjustments in the context of the Euro and the global financial crises. Taking the perspective of the evolutionary approach to institutions, the formation of a new currency area is not unidirectional. The process leading to the euro is an example of a common...

The creation of the euro should now be recognized as an experiment that has led to the sovereign debt crisis in several countries, the fragile condition of major European banks, the high levels of unemployment, and the large trade deficits that now exist in most Eurozone countries. Although the...

Formation of the Euro area raises new questions about the coordination of monetary and fiscal policy. Using a New Neoclassical Synthesis (NNS) model, we show that a common monetary policy, responding to area-wide aggregates, has asymmetric effects on countries within the union, depending on...

In our European Economic Review (2002) paper, we used pre-1998 data on countries participating in and leaving currency unions to estimate the effect of currency unions on trade using (then-) conventional gravity models. In this paper, we use a variety of empirical gravity models to estimate the...

Although recent research shows that the euro has spurred cross-border financial integration, the exact mechanisms remain unknown. We investigate the underlying channels of the euro's effect on financial integration using data on bilateral banking linkages among twenty industrial countries in the...

A common European bond would yield a common European Monetary Union risk free rate. We present tentative estimates of this common risk free for the European Monetary Union countries from 2004 to 2009 using variables motivated by a theoretical portfolio selection model. First, we analyze the...

This study grounds the establishment of EMU and the euro in the context of the history of international monetary cooperation and of monetary unions, above all in the U.S., Germany and Italy. The purpose of national monetary unions was to reduce transactions costs of multiple currencies and...

When countries of different sizes participate in a cooperative agreement, the potential gain from deviation determines the minimum power that each country requires in the common decision-making. lt;brgt;lt;bRgt;This paper studies the problem in the context of a monetary union - multiple...

We present historical examples of new forms of money that can be com- pared with the ECU. We first define the ECU in its official role before turning to developments in the private market for ECUs. We then examine historical antecedents of three attributes of ECUs: a unit of account; a basket of...