The paper documents how the code of conduct implied by membership of the escudo in the Exchange Rate Mechanism of the Europan Monetary System (ERM) allowed Portugal to qualify for Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), ultimately moving the currency into the euro. This unwritten code of conduct...

Monetary textbooks customarily define money by its three properties as a means of transaction, as a unit of account and as a store of value. It is vast preponderance of domestic exchanges, a single unit-the legal tender serves to fullfill the first two functions: the prices are quoted in units...

As shown in Sinn and Wollmershäuser (2012a), during the European balance-of-payments crisis, inter-governmental credit and Target credit granted by core-country central banks have replaced private international capital flows in financing the crisis countries' current account deficits, and even...

The paper studies the determinants of unemployment in a two-country model, where real wages are the outcome of the strategic interaction between various institutional players (firms, unions, central banks). We show that: (i) the results derived in the recent literature on this topic are not...