Labor mobility is commonly taken as a property of an optimal currency area. But how does that property affect the outcome of fiscal policies? In our model, we show that perfect (costless) labour mobility is not necessarily welfare improving, since it prevents the national fiscal authorities from...

While the EU recovery plan provides a useful step in alleviating the economic effects of the coronavirus crisis and achieving further European integration, a permanent fiscal stabilization capacity dealing with major crises is still missing. Such a EU-wide stabilization function would be in...

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 paper compares the boom-and-bust cycles in Japan and Europe with respect to the reasons for excessive booms, the characteristics of the crises, and the (potential) effects of the crisis therapies. As in Japan the consequence of expansionary monetary and fiscal policies is the hysteresis of...

This paper analyzes the problem of designing macroeconomic stabilization policies within the European Monetary Union (EMU) as a dynamic game between a centralized monetary authority, the European Central Bank (ECB), and national fiscal policy makers. Non-cooperative feedback Nash equilibrium and...

This paper analyses the smoothing of asymmetric shocks to output for a sample of OECD countries. It also examines whether the private capital markets will be able to replace the government in providing output smoothing in the euro-area, in the near future. The research finds no evidence of large...

The paper analyses the common European monetary policy based on a Mises-Hayek overinvestment framework, which is combined with the theory of optimum currency areas. It shows how since the turn of the millennium a too expansionary monetary policy contributed to unsustainable overinvestment booms...

It is widely argued that Europe's unified monetary policy calls for the international coordination at the fiscal level. We survey the issues involved with such coordination of fiscal policy as a demand management tool and we use a simple model to investigate the circumstances under which...

The euro area will not have a centralised budget and smoothing of country-specific asymmetric shocks via private financial markets will develop only slowly. Mistrust among the governments has caused rigid, even pro-cyclical fiscal policies. Smoothing mechanisms are absent due to the fear that...