During the latter part of the 1990s the introduction of the euro, the dramatic increase in the supply of venture capital in most EU countries, and the creation of several 'new' equity markets targeted at innovative firms have dramatically transformed the financing prospects of European...

This paper reports the results of a survey among private sector economists about credibility and transparency of central banks. In line with the survey of Alan Blinder among central bankers, we asked participants in Ifo's World Economic Survey to answer questions on the importance and...

This paper studies ECB and Bundesbank communication on monetary policy during the first years of the European Economic and Monetary Union. We study whether statements by different (groups of) central bankers have been contradictory and whether differences have diminished over time. We find that...

This paper proposes an analysis of two major tax events which occurred in the European Union in 2001, the move of Germany from imputation to exemption and the objective announced by the EU Commission to provide EU businesses with a consolidated corporate tax base for their EU-wide activities. In...

This paper estimates Nash-type fiscal reaction functions for European governments competing for revenue from diesel excises. It appears that European governments strategically set their excise levels by responding to their neighbors' tax rates. This provides evidence for the presence of tax...

I analyze the optimal design of banking supervision in the presence of cross-border lending. Cross-border lending could imply that an individual bank failure in one country could trigger negative spillover effects in another country. Such cross-border contagion effects could turn out to be...

A persistent criticism of general equilibrium models of monetary policy which incorporate nominal inertia in the form of the New Keynesian Phillips Curce (NKPC) is that they fail to capture the extent of inflation inertia in the data. In this paper we derive a general equilibrium model based on...

Most macroeconomic models treat the central bank and the treasury as a unified entity. The balance sheet of the central bank is therefore implicitly treated as an accounting fiction. While this is often realistic, the central bank balance sheet today, with the US and ESCB balance sheets nearly...