The enlargement of the European Monetary Union is likely to lead to an increase in uncertainty regarding the transmission of monetary policy for the larger union. Adding new members to the central bank council will in addition imply that the policy reaction of the enlarged council will be...

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...

When countries need to implement costly economic policy reforms, these often imply uncertainties about their effectiveness for the home country and their spillovers to other countries. We develop a model to show that under these circumstances countries implement too few or too many policy...

What are the incentives for governments to coordinate their policies internationally when there is model disagreement and uncertainty? We build a model where countries disagree on policy targets and how policies affect the economies, and show that uncertainty not only determines the type of...

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...

What policy objective should a common central bank in a heterogeneous monetary union pursue? Should it base its decisions on the EU-wide average of inflation and growth or should it instead focus on (appropriately weighted) national welfare losses based on national rates of inflation and growth?...

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 paper examines the optimal combination of central bank independence and conservatism in the presence of uncertain central bank preferences. We develop a model of endogenous monetary policy delegation in which government chooses the central bank's degree of inde-pendence and conservatism so...

We study how the optimal degree of conservatism relates to decision-making procedures in a Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). In our framework, central bank conservatism is required to attenuate the volatility of monetary decisions generated by the presence of uncertainty about the committee...

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...