When countries of different sizes participate in a cooperative agreement, the potential gain from deviation determines the minimum power that each country requires in the common decision-making. lt;brgt;lt;bRgt;This paper studies the problem in the context of a monetary union - multiple...

Motivated by the need for more flexible decision-making mechanisms in the European Union, the paper proposes a simple but novel voting scheme for binary decisions taken by committees that meet regularly over time. At each meeting, committee members are allowed to store their vote for future use;...

The thesis of this paper is that more transparent, rule-bound and subtle mechanisms for policy coordination will be needed to ensure the success of an enlarged European Union. A common policy is a public good with distributional implications. Economists have developed a large number of plausible...

Following the rationale for regional redistribution programs described in the official documents of the European Union, this paper studies a very simple multi-country model built around two regions: a core and a periphery. Technological spill-overs link firms' productivity in each of the two...

Exchange rates of currencies in the Exchange Rate Mechanism of the EMS are characterized by long periods of stability interrupted by periods of extreme volatility. The periods of volatility appear at times of realignments of the central parities and at times when the exchange rate is within the...

Are there systematic forces such that countries of different sizes participating in a free trade bloc gain differently from the entry of new members? If economies of scale imply that firms located in large countries enjoy lower costs, then the gains from enlarging the bloc will fall...

This paper explores the implications of the European single currency within a simple sticky price intertemporal model. The main issue we focus on is how the euro may alter the responsiveness of consumer prices to exchange rate changes. Our central conjectures is that the acceptance of the euro...

Recently, Imbs et. al. (2002) have claimed that much of the purchasing power parity puzzle can be explained by aggregation bias'. This paper re-examines aggregation bias. First, it clarifies the meaning of aggregation bias and its applicability to the PPP puzzle. Second, the size of the bias' is...

The traditional case for flexibility in nominal exchange rates assumes that there is nominal price stickiness that prevents relative prices from adjusting in response to real shocks. When prices are sticky in producers' currencies, nominal exchange rate changes can achieve the relative price...

Borrowing from the experience of environmental markets, this paper proposes a system of tradable deficit permits as an efficient mechanism for implementing fiscal constraints in the European Monetary Union: having chosen an aggregate target for the Union and an initial distribution of permits,...