The 2008-09 crisis has shown that some euro area member countries were unable to sufficiently stabilize their economies which has given rise to a debate about deeper fiscal integration in Europe. In this paper, we analyze the redistributive and stabilizing effects of two scenarios of fiscal...

This paper discusses the issue of profit shifting and "aggressive" tax planning by multinational firms. The paper makes two contributions. First, it provides some background information to the debate by giving a brief overview of existing empirical studies on profit shifting and by describing...

A mechanism to restructure the debt of an insolvent euro country is a missing element in the emerging institutional architecture of the euro area. The introduction of an insolvency proce-dure for sovereigns faces a dilemma: In the foreseeable future, its introduction would risk pushing Europe...

In this study, we analyze the cyclicality of fiscal policies in China during the period 1978-2013. We find that the cyclicality of local government spending in China significantly affects the cyclicality of total government spending. By employing both time-series and province-level panel data,...

The German experience of the crisis was very different compared to those of most other countries in Europe. Germany was hit by a very strong shock which was relatively concentrated in the exporting, manufacturing industries. In addition, the German labour market was very resilient during the...

The rest of this paper is set up as follows. In section 2 we provide a brief description of the ECB's comprehensive assessment of the European banking system. In section 3 we describe the data we are using and provide some descriptive statistics, particularly regarding the changes between the...

This contribution develops a blueprint for a European fiscal union. The proposal addresses the shortcomings of most other reform designs which do not offer a solution for insolvent or non-cooperative euro countries. We suggest a design which combines fiscal insurance with an orderly procedure to...

This paper discusses the issue of profit shifting and ‘aggressive' tax planning by multinational firms. The paper makes two contributions. Firstly, we provide some background information to the debate by giving a brief overview over existing empirical studies on profit shifting and by...

Because of endogeneity problems very few studies have been able to identify the incidence of corporate taxes on wages. We circumvent these problems by using an 11-year panel of data on 11,441 German municipalities' tax rates, 8 percent of which change each year, linked to administrative matched...

We analyze different alternatives how a common unemployment insurance system for the euro area (EA) could be designed and assess their effectiveness to act as an insurance device in the presence of asymmetric macroeconomic shocks. Running counterfactual simulations based on micro data for the...