Recent attempts to incorporate optimal fiscal policy into NewKeynesian models subject to nominal inertia, have tended to assume that policymakers are benevolent and have access to a commitment technology. A separateliterature, on the New Political Economy, has focused on real economies...

The economics literature is full of studies of monetary or currency unions ranging from the sterling area before 1914, to the Bretton Woods system later and the euro zone within the European Monetary Union today. A quick search in Econ-Lit returned over 10,000 entries among abstracts and...

The mid-1980s began a period that might, in retrospect, be seen as the golden age of monetary policy. Worldwide inflation rates, which had come down from the high levels reached in the 1970s, were at the lowest level seen in a long time. In the real economy, low and stable inflation went along...

Existing work on wage bargaining (as exemplified by Cukierman and Lippi, 2001) typicallypredicts more aggressive wage setting under monetary union. This insight has not beenconfirmed by the EMU experience, which has been characterised by wage moderation,thereby eliciting criticism from Posen and...

This paper examines monetary policy in a currency union whose member countries exhibitheterogeneous rates of limited asset markets participation (LAMP). As a result risksharing among member countries is imperfect and the monetary transmission mechanismcan dier across countries. In the limit the...

This paper analyzes German and Spanish fiscal policy using simple policy rules. We choose Germany and Spain, as both are Member States in the European Monetary Union (EMU) and underwent considerable increases in public debt in the early 1990s. We focus on the question, how fiscal policy behaves...

In practice, central banks have been confronted with a trade-off between stabilising inflation and output when dealing with rising oil prices. This contrasts with the result in the standard New Keynesian model that ensuring complete price stability is the optimal thing to do, even when an oil...

While consumption habits have been utilised as a means of generating a hump shapedoutput response to monetary policy shocks in sticky-price New Keynesian economies,there is relatively little analysis of the impact of habits (particularly, external habits) onoptimal policy. In this paper we...