Major differences between national financial systems might make a common monetary policy difficult. As within Europe, Germany and the United Kingdom differ most with respect to their financial systems, the present paper addresses its topic under the assumption that the United Kingdom is already...

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...

This paper estimates the Balassa-Samuelson effects for 11 countries in central and eastern Europe on a disaggregated set of quarterly data covering the period from the mid-1990s to the first quarter of 2008. The Balassa-Samuelson effects are clearly present and explain around 24% of inflation...

We use a two-country model with a central bank maximizing union-wide welfareand two fiscal authorities minimizing comparable, but slightly differentcountry-wide losses. We analyze the rivalry between the three authorities inseven static games. Comparing a homogeneous with a heterogeneous...