We show that welfare can be lower under complete financial markets than under autarky in a monetary union with home bias, sticky prices and asymmetric shocks. Such a monetary union is a second-best environment in which the structure of financial markets affects risk-sharing but also shapes the...

Recent financial crises in Europe as well as the periodic battles in the U.S. over the debt ceiling point to the importance of fiscal discipline among developed countries. This paper develops an open economy model, calibrated to the U.S. and a subset of the EMU, to evaluate the impact of various...

A robust prediction across a wide range of open-economy macroeconomic models is that an unanticipated increase in public spending in a given country appreciates it currency in real terms. This result, however, contradicts the findings of a number of recent empirical studies, which instead...