This paper advances the hypothesis that the EMS crisis was caused by German unification. The unification has implied a massive resource demand which parallels the U.S. resource demand following Reagan's tax reforms in the eighties. The resource demand revised the German interest rates relative...

The rules laid down in Article 32 of the Protocol No. 18 on the Statute of the European System of Central Banks and of the European Central Bank of the Maastricht Treaty will significantly redistribute European seignorage income and hence the implicit entitlement to the 352 billion Euro stock of...

The European Monetary Union will involve socialization of existing seigniorage wealth of national central banks. This socialization will create windfall gains for countries with relatively low monetary bases such as France and the United Kingdom and will be disadvantageous for countries like...

The European Monetary Union (EMU) will involve socialization of the existing seigniorage wealth of the national central banks because the Euro will have to be bought by these banks in exchange for assets which have been accumulated in the historical process of money creation. This socialization...

We disentangle different driving factors of sovereign bond market integration by studying yield co-movements of EMU countries, the UK, the US and 16 German Länder in the last 15 years. At a low frequency of weeks, bond market integration has increased gradually in the course of the last 15...

This paper advances the hypothesis that the EUS crisis was caused by German unification. The unification has implied a massive resource demand which parallels the US resource demand following Reagan's tax reforms in the eighties. The resource demand revised the German interest rates relative to...

In a monetary union, national fiscal deficits are of limited help to counteract deep recessions; union-wide support is needed. A common euro-area budget (1) should provide a temporary but significant transfer of resources in case of large regional shocks, (2) would be an instrument to counteract...

The construction of the euro area left aside the question of a fiscal union, but the crisis re-opened the debate. Of the three classical functions of fiscal policy – provision of public goods, redistribution and stabilisation – only the last provides a clear justification for fiscal policy...