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...

Rainer Brüderle, Bundesminister für Wirtschaft und Technologie, sieht für eine weitergehende Zentralisierung der Wirtschaftspolitik keinen Grund. Die für die jeweilige Situation eines Mitgliedstaats bestmögliche Ausgestaltung von Strukturreformen gelinge am ehesten in nationaler...

Am 1. Januar wird Slowenien als 13. Mitglied der Europäischen Währungsunion beitreten. Bulgarien und Rumänien werden zum gleichen Zeitpunkt neue Mitglieder der EU, so dass die Anzahl der potentiellen Eurokandidatenländer auf 14 anwachsen wird. Welche Auswirkungen sind von der Erweiterung der...

The implementation of European Union directives into national law is at the discretion of member states. We analyze incentives for member states to deviate from these directives when the European Commission may sue a defecting member state and rulings at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) are...

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...