I revisit the potential costs and benefits for Sweden of joining the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) of the European Union. I first show that the Swedish business cycle since the mid-1990s has been closely correlated with the Euro area economies, suggesting that common shocks have been an...

This paper studies Ramsey-optimal monetary and fiscal policy in a New Keynesian 2-country open economy framework, which is used to assess how far fiscal policy can substitute for the role of nominal exchange rates within a monetary union. Giving up exchange rate flexibility leads to welfare...

The paper analyses the transmission of global financial shocks to individual member states of the European Monetary Union (EMU), in which monetary policy is delegated to the ECB and financial markets are fully integrated. Using a panel VAR model, we show that the asymmetric effects of global...

Against the background of the recent housing boom and bust in countries such as Spain and Ireland, we investigate in this paper the macroeconomic consequences of cross-border banking in monetary unions such as the euro area. For this purpose, we incorporate in an otherwise standard two-region...

The ECB's one size monetary policy is unlikely to fit all euro area members at all times, which raises the question of how much monetary policy stress this causes at the national level. I measure monetary policy stress as the difference between actual ECB interest rates and Taylor-rule implied...

Between 1999 and the onset of the economic crisis in 2008 real exchange rates in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain appreciated relative to the rest of the euro area. This divergence in competitiveness was reflected in the emergence of current account imbalances. Given that exchange rate...

At a time of historic challenges to the viability of the Eurozone, we assess the contribution of the EU and the Euro to equity market integration in Europe. We use a simple and essentially model free measure of bilateral market segmentation: two countries are segmented if there is a wide...

A common European bond would yield a common European Monetary Union risk free rate. We present tentative estimates of this common risk free for the European Monetary Union countries from 2004 to 2009 using variables motivated by a theoretical portfolio selection model. First, we analyze the...

This paper studies fiscal spillovers in a monetary union. The focus of the analysis is on the interaction between the fiscal policy of member countries (regions) and the central monetary authority. When capital markets are integrated, the fiscal policy of one country will influence equilibrium...