The implementation of European Union directives into national law is at the discretion of member states. We analyze incentives for member states to deviate from these directives when the European Commission may sue a defecting member state and rulings at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) are...

We examine monetary and fiscal interactions in a monetary union model with uncertainty due to imperfect central bank transparency. It is first shown that monetary uncertainty discourages excessive taxation and may thus reduce average inflation and output distortions. However, as countries enter...

When countries need to implement costly economic policy reforms, these often imply uncertainties about their effectiveness for the home country and their spillovers to other countries. We develop a model to show that under these circumstances countries implement too few or too many policy...

Germany prides itself in having one of the most successful central banks and currencies with respect to independence and stability. I show that not only were both imposed on the country after 1945 but that there was also initial resistance to both among German experts and officials. This was...

When enacting labor market regulation governments face courts that interpret and implement the legal code. We show that the incentives for governments for labor market reform increase with the uncertainty that is involved in the implementation of legal codes through courts. Given that judges...

The paper analyzes the relation between institutional quality, such as corruption, in a country and its monetary regime. It is shown that a credibly …xed exchange rate to a low in‡ation country, like a currency board, can reduce corruption and improve the …scal system. A monetary union,...

The paper analyzes under what circumstances policymakers experiment with policies with uncertain outcomes, when they prefer to imitate policies initiated in other countries, and when they prefer to coordinate policies internationally. Policymakers have private costs of active policies and...

We develop a formal model that looks at the mutually endogenous determination of foreign direct investments in natural resource-rich countries, the decision of host governments to expropriate these investments, and the level of corruption. Higher resource production makes expropriation more...

The paper uses a comprehensive data set with bilateral direct investment flows and establishes the influence of the de-facto exchange rate regime for FDI flows. We find a strong and significant effect from fixed rates on bilateral FDI flows in developed economies, but no significant effect for...

This paper revisits the trade-of between central bank independence and conservatism using a New Keynesian model with uncertainty about the central banker's output gap target. It is shown that when this uncertainty is high, the trade-of no longer holds. In this case, the optimal combination...