We use a novel approach to address the question of whether a union of sovereign countries can efficiently raise and allocate a budget, even when members are purely self-interested and participation is voluntary. The main innovation of our model is to explore the link between budget contributions...

Zu den Verpflichtungen der Mitglieder im Europäischen Fiskalpakt gehört unter anderem, eine nationale Schuldenbremse einzuführen - eine Regel zur Begrenzung der jährlichen Neuverschuldung. Deutschland ist diesen Schritt bereits gegangen. Im vorliegenden Beitrag überprüfen wir, inwieweit...

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) provide opportunities for a more flexible and market-based provision of public services. At the same time, they may impair fiscal transparency and offer politicians discretion in the presence of strict fiscal rules if these only constrain the core udget. Using a...

The euro area crisis is often linked to the emergence of current account imbalances. As most of the deficit countries experienced pronounced credit booms at the same time that these imbalances were building up, this paper investigates the link between domestic credit developments and the current...

In this paper, we analyse different measures of asset and income poverty using micro-data for 15 euro area countries from the 2010 Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). We are particularly interested in the way in which specific definitions of income and wealth poverty affect the...

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...

We study cross-country differences in monetary policy transmission across the large four euro-area countries (France, Germany, Italy and Spain) using a large Bayesian vector autoregressive model with endogenous prior selection. Drawing both on the posterior distributions of the cross-country...

We analyze the impact of financial crises and monetary policy on the supply of wholesale funding liquidity, and also on the compositional supply effects through cross-border and relationship lending. For empirical identification, we draw on the proprietary bank-to-bank European interbank dataset...