With a view to establishing a Capital Markets Union (CMU), efforts to integrate (private) capital markets and private risk-sharing in the European Union are underway. However, the single (capital) market will be burdened by a perennial potential threat to sovereign bond market stability in the...

The Capital Markets Union (CMU) is a flagship project of the European Commission that promotes a deepening of the financial markets. It aims at opening up new sources of funding for SMEs, as well as improving the matching between savers and borrowers. Additionally, CMU is supposed to increase...

After a period of deepening financial integration, the financial crisis triggered a fragmentation of Europe’s capital markets along national lines. Financial integration was prone to sudden stops and capital reversals because cross-border capital flows predominantly consisted of short-term...

The answer to competition from emerging countries with low wage costs must be very different according to the affected sector. We need to draw a distinction between manufacturing industry and services that can be relocated and other sectors: consumer services, retail, construction, most business...

The theme of this contribution is how Europe will evolve over the next decade. The key message is that over this decade Europe will be busy digesting the 12 members that joined in 2004 and 2007. Digesting in the context means that the new members will only gradually be incorporated and...

The aim of this paper is to investigate how the birth of a central fiscal authority or the creation of a fiscal transfer mechanism could improve the action of fiscal policy in terms of stabilization in the EMU. In particular, the paper examines the theoretical reasons to support this conclusion...

This paper analyses the structural developments underlying the evolution of public finances in Germany after qualification for EMU. For this purpose, we extend a disaggregated approach to cyclical adjustment in a way that allows us inter alia to distinguish the impact of discretionary fiscal...

Prior to EMU, fiscal policy within the EU was disciplined by the threat of exclusion of the single currency; post-EMU, discipline has been exerted through the provisions of the Stability and Growth Pact. In this paper, we contrast the discipline induced by the two separate regimes on three...