We analyse optimal abatement and carbon pricing strategies under a variety of economic, temperature and damage risks. Economic growth, convex damages and temperature-dependent risks of climatic tipping points lead to higher growth rates of carbon prices, but gradual resolution of uncertainty...

The tradable or transferable permit system, "cap and trade", is one of the most innovative policy options developed by environmental economists. Over the last 40 years, cap and trade programs have been used around the globe by some of the world’s biggest economies. By placing a cap on a bad,...

This paper estimates a time-varying AR-GARCH model of inflation producing measures of inflation uncertainty for the euro area, and investigates the linkages between them in a VAR framework, also allowing for the possible impact of the policy regime change associated with the start of EMU in...

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...

This paper uses the European Commission's Consumer Survey to assess whether inflation expectations have converged and whether inflation uncertainty has diminished following the introduction of the Euro in Europe. Consumers' responses to the survey suggest that inflation expectations depend more...

The interaction of monetary and fiscal policies is a crucial issue in a highly integrated economic area as the European Union. We argue that EMU, which introduced a common monetary policy and restrictions on fiscal policy at the national level, increases the need for macroeconomic policy...

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...

This paper examines how neutral the current EU decision-making procedures are to membership and how well they obey certain transparent general constitutional principles. The paper evaluates the performance of the procedures by strategic and classical power indices. The main emphasis in the...

The risk of recurrent outbreaks following the main waves of a pandemic has been acknowledged. We provide evidence of the scale and duration of this outbreak risk. We compile municipal public health records and use national data to model the stochastic process of mortality rates after the main...