The Greek bail-out was highly controversial. An oft-heard assessment is that i) the bail-out was a mistake, ii) the political haggling over it was irrational and iii) the bail-out will create a moral hazard problem. Contrary to this view, our analysis suggests that, given EMU's present...

We study how policies limiting the spending capacity of local governments may reduce corruption. We exploit the extension of one such policy, the Domestic Stability Pact (DSP), to small Italian municipalities. The DSP led to a decrease in both recorded corruption rates and corruption charges per...

To investigate how Covid-19 is shaping the way Europeans think about institutions, we conducted a large online survey experiment during the first wave of the epidemic (June). With a randomised survey ow we varied whether respondents are given Covid-related treatment questions first, before...

In response to the global crisis a number of new institutional measures have been introduced in the fiscal framework, both on the UE and on the member states’ level, and the question is: have these measures provided better fiscal sustainability outcomes? We approach this question by looking at...

This paper argues that the key issue for defining and solving the Eurozone's (EZ) difficulties lies in readjusting the relationship between the centre and the periphery of the EZ. Our argument proceeds in two steps. Firstly, the basic finance problem of a centre-periphery system is captured by a...