The enlargement of the European Monetary Union is likely to lead to an increase of uncertainty about the transmission of monetary policy for the larger union. Adding new members to the central bank council will in addition imply that the preferences of the enlarged council will be uncertain in...

This paper uses an unbalanced panel data set for exporting firms from manufacturing industries in one German federal state, Lower Saxony, to investigate the micro-structure of the recent export boom. Looking at data for 1995/96 to 2001/02 it is demonstrated that a considerable number of plants...

In this paper we analyse the employment implications of firing restrictions. We find that when a recession is expected and the trend rate of productivity growth is small, a rise in firing costs affects mainly the hiring decision. Thus there is a negative effect on average employment. When, on...

Das Papier untersucht die Rolle von Frühindikatoren bei der Erstellung von Konjunkturprognosen. Gegenstand der Analyse sind die Fragen: Welche Kriterien sollten Frühindikatoren generell erfüllen bzw. was sollten Frühindikatoren leisten? Inwieweit erfüllen die gängigen Indikatoren diese...

A two sector small open economy model developed by Corden (1991, 2002) is used to analyse the impact of sudden stops in capital inflows on an internal and external equilibrium and to explore the merits of disposing of the nominal exchange rate as policy tool in rectifying real exchange rate...

Using entropy indices and associated bootstrap tests, we describe the distribution of economic sectors across Western European regions over the 1975-2000 period. We decompose geographic concentration into its within-country and between-country components. In addition, we estimate...

The findings of recent studies on adjustment processes suggest that regional labour markets in the EU and the US differ significantly. Low wage flexibility and limited labour mobility in European countries involve persistent unemployment differentials across regions. However, the spatial...

Im Zuge der europäischen Integration haben die nationalen Regierungen Kompetenzen an europäische Institutionen abgegeben. Die Folge ist, daß die ökonomische Entwicklung in der EU mehr und mehr von wirtschaftsräumlichen Faktoren anstatt von administrativen nationalen Unterschieden bestimmt...

Das historische Wochenende vom 1. bis 3. Mai 1998 hat deutlich gezeigt, daß Euphorie und freischwebende Visionen nicht angebracht sind und Nüchternheit vonnöten ist, wenn es um die Analyse der Perspektiven der Europäischen Währungsunion geht. Nun geht es nicht mehr darum, für oder gegen...

When I wrote my book on EMU four years ago (Kenen 1995), very little had been written on the international dimensions of EMU There was a chapter in the Commission's path-breaking study (European Commission, 1990). There were papers by Alogoskoufis and Portes (1991, 1992), Cooper (1992), Goodhart...