Tax competition arguments suggest that governements that operate in an open economy (such as local governments) should not and will not rely on non-benefit taxes, such as the income tax. Yet we observe reliance on income taxes by local governments in many countries, and such reliance changes...

This report addresses the legal aspects of how the EU’s Cohesion Policy has changed over the past decade, exploring the legal argumentation behind its transformation. Cohesion Policy used to be understood as a policy with distinct features and clear limits, characterised by its focus on...

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...

Private wealth is a crucial factor for the economic well-being of households. Key determinants of private wealth include intergenerational wealth transfers (gifts and inheritances), which are gaining importance since 1990, as research suggests. We conduct a detailed investigation of the...

Using an estimated large-scale New-Keynesian model, we assess welfare and business cycle consequences of a fiscal union within EMU. We differentiate between three different scenarios: public revenue equalisation, tax harmonisation and a centralised fiscal authority. Relative to the status quo,...