We study the effects of two dimensions of teacher quality, subject knowledge and didactic skills, on student learning in francophone Sub-Saharan Africa. We use data from an international large-scale assessment in 14 countries that include individual-level information on student achievement and...

This paper employs a stylized New Keynesian DSGE model for a monetary union to analyze whether cyclical inflation differentials can be explained by cross-country differences concerning the characteristics of financial markets. Our results suggest that empirically plausible degrees of...

We derive the optimal exchange rate policy for a small open economy subject to terms-oftrade shocks. Firm owners and workers are risk averse but workers more so. Wages are given or partially indexed in the short run, and capital markets are imperfect. The government sets the exchange rate to...

We explore the implications of monetary unification for real interest rates and (relative) public debt levels. The adoption of a common monetary policy renders the risk-return characteristics of the participating countries more similar, so that the substitutability of their public debt increases...

The former EU president Jean-Claude Junker has proposed that all countries of the European Union should also adopt the euro as their currency and recent research has shown that countries currently pursuing this goal indeed fulfill the classical Optimal Currency Area (OCA) criterion of positively...

Country-specific business cycle fluctuations are potentially very costly for member states of currency unions because they lack monetary autonomy. The actual costs depend on the extent to which consumption is shielded from these fluctuations and thus on the extent of risk sharing across member...

This paper studies the design of the policy mix in a monetary union, that is, the institutional arrangement specifying the relationships between the various policymakers present in the union and the extent of their capacity of action. It is assumed that policymakers do not cooperate. Detailing...

We build a no-arbitrage model of the yield curves in a heterogeneous monetary union with sovereign default risk, which can account for the asymmetric shifts in euro area yields during the Covid-19 pandemic. We derive an affine term structure solution, and decompose yields into term premium and...

The paper examines the monetary-fiscal interactions in a monetary union model with uncertainty due to imperfect central bank transparency. We first show that monetary uncertainty disciplines fiscal policymakers and thereby reduces taxes, average inflation and output distortions. However, as more...

In this paper we consider a number of key issues related to the policy coordination in a monetary union that has been recently discussed in the literature. To this end we propose a multi-country New-Keynesian model of a monetary union cast in the framework of linear quadratic differential games....