The paper analyses the EU fiscal rules from a political economy perspective and derives some policy lessons. Following a literature survey, the paper stresses the importance of appropriate incentives for rule compliance in an environment where national fiscal sovereignty precludes the option of...

Will EMU accelerate or retard structural reform in labour and product markets? The theoretical literature is ambiguous. New descriptive evidence provided in this paper suggests that euro-area countries have made relatively good progress in structural reform. However, it is much less clear...

Will EMU accelerate or retard structural reform in labour and product markets? The theoretical literature is ambiguous. New descriptive evidence provided in this paper suggests that euro-area countries have made relatively good progress in structural reform. However, it is much less clear...

We study supervisory interventions in cross-border banks under different institutional architectures in a model in which a bank may provide voluntary support to an impaired subsidiary using resources from a healthy subsidiary. While supranational architecture permits voluntary support, national...

We review the recent literature on rational inattention, identify the main theoretical mechanisms, and explain how it helps us understand a variety of phenomena across fields of economics. The theory of rational inattention assumes that agents cannot process all available information, but they...

This paper describes optimal contracts in a dynamic costly state verification model with stochastic monitoring. An agent operates a risky project on behalf of a principal over several periods. Each period, the principal can observe the revenues from the project provided he incurs a fixed cost....

In most countries, the supply of paper money is controlled by a state institution. This paper provides an explanation for why such an arrangement is typically chosen. I use a deterministic matching model with a continuum of agents where enforcement is limited and where some agents produce public...

In this paper I show that a lax anti-counterfeiting policy is inconsistent with price stability. I use a deterministic matching model with no commitment and no enforcement. An intrinsically worthless but perfectly durable object called a ‘note’ can be produced by banks at a given cost, but...

We study the effect of transaction costs (e.g., a trading fee or a transaction tax, like the Tobin tax)on the aggregation of private information in financial markets. We analyze a financial market à la Glosten and Milgrom, in which informed and uninformed traders trade in sequence with a market...

We introduce professional financial advice in households’ choice to hold risky financial assets. Consistent with the predictions from a formal model, we present evidence that households’ trust in financial advice only matters when their perceived own financial capability is low. Instead, for...