Does a monetary union need fiscal shock absorbers helping the participating countries to cope with asymmetric shocks? The consensus in the debate over EMU argues that the answer is yes. In this paper, we revisit the issue, building on a dynamic, general equilibrium framework of regions in a...

We provide empirical estimates of the risk-sharing and redistributive properties of the German federal from 1970 until 2006, with special attention to the effects of German fiscal system base unification. We find that tax revenue sharing between the states and the federal government and the...

We study the channels of interstate risk sharing in Germany for the time period 1970 to 2006 following the methodology of Asdrubali et al. (1996). Their framework allows us to estimate the degree of smoothing of a shock to a state’s gross domestic product by factor markets, the government...